Histoire du Romantisme

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Histoire du romantisme (1874) is a posthumously published book by French writer Théophile Gautier.

[edit]

Full text (English translation of 1902)[1], in a translation by Frederick-Caesar de Sumichrast

Full text of "The Works Of Theophile Gautier Volume Sixteen A History Of Romanticism"

THE \VQRKS OF

IN TWENTY-FOUR VOLUMES

HIS KDITION IS LIMITED TO ONE THOUSAND COI>IKS % EACH OF WHICH IS NUMKKkKD AND RKGISTKRED

THE NUMBER OF THIS SET I5>

Ptrttt<m

THE WORKS OF

VOLUME SIXTEEN

TRANSLATED AND EDITED BY

PROFESSOR F. C. DE SUMICHRAST

Department of French, Harvard University

A HISTORY OF ROMANTICISM

THE PROGRESS OF FRENCH POETRY SINCE M DCCC XXX

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BT THE EDITOR

NEW YORK PUBLISHED FOR SUBSCRIBERS ONLY BY

GEORGE D. SPROUL - MCMVIH

Contents

INTRODUCTION ......... Page 3

A HISTORY OF ROMANTICISM

I THE FIRST MEETING ....... " 15

II THE INNER CIRCLE ....... " 30

III THE INNER CIRCLE ....... * 41

IV THE MIRACULOUS COMRADE ..... " 53 V GRAZIANO .......... 65

VI CELESTIN MANTEUIL ....... * 75

VII OTHER MEDALLIONS PHILOTHEEO* NEDDY ** 87

VIII GERARD DE NERVAL ....... " 96

IX THE GREEN PORTFOLIO ...... "117

X THE LEGEND OF THE RED WAISTCOAT , . " 127

XI FIRST PERFORMANCE OF *<HERNANI" . . " 137

XII ^HERNANI" ......... "148

THE REVIVAL OF "HERNANI" .... "156

ROMANTICIST STUDIES

EUG!NE DEV&UA ......... "165

Louis BELANGER .......... "172

THEODORE ROUSSEAU ........ "176

FROMENT MEURICE ....*.. "187

BARYE ............. "192

HlPPOLYTE MONPOU ........ * c 2O2

HECTOR BERLIOZ ......... ** 207

MADAME DORVAL ........ , ** 222

LEMAITRE ..... * . . "228

THE PROGRESS OF FRENCH POETRY

SINCE MDCCCXXX ...... "233

List of Illustrations

- The survivors, however, were present, and it was

with melancholy pleasure that I recognised them in the stalls or the boxes" .... frontispiece

A photogravure from a painting by Edouard Danton.

fc After having long suffered from persecution, the

Great Ever Refused,' as he was called, had

actually become a member of the Hanging Committee" .......... Page 182

j% photogravure from a painting by Henry Gervex.

The "Lion and Serpent," which is perhaps

Barye's masterpiece ........ "198

A pbotogratt u re from the bronze in tht Tuileries Gardens sculptured by jtfntoinc Louis Baryt*

Homage to Berlioz .......... <e 207

A photogravure from a painting by H. Fantln-Latour, showing tie tribute of the Muses to the memory of Bcrl\o>&,

JTrz?

HISTORT OF ROMANTICISM

Introduction

ONE of the earliest, and one of the most interesting and entertaining monuments of French literature is Villehardouin's ct Conquest of Constantinople." It is a simple and straightforward account of an expedition in which the writer, a typical feudal lord and knight of old, took a prominent part and won for himself fame as a warrior and a diplomatist, and later, and wholly without literary ambition, renown as a writer. The charm of that old work lies in the simplicity and art- lessness of the style, in the evident pleasure the writer takes in recalling the great deeds and daring enter- prises in which he was personally engaged. It is the individuality of the man, the exposition of his charac- ter and his motives and hopes, the absolutely frank and

AMIS T O R Y OF ROM A NT I C I S M

candid statement of his views and feelings, his Brilliant, because natural, description of the battles he has fought in, of the surprises and stratagems he has devised or had devised against him, of his daily life, of his cher- ished ideals, in a word, that even now attract and retain the reader's attention. He is so firmly convinced of the right of his cause, so sure that God is on his side and that of his comrades, so convinced that the foe must always be in the wrong, that it is simply delight- ful to accompany him on a crusade so singularly di- verted from its original purpose.

Theophile (Jsmticr's u History of Romanticism " possesses the same charm > is full of the same interest. Doubtless many nowadays will refuse to imlor.sc his enthusiastic praise of the Romanticist movement and his laudation of the men who led it and who Awjjht its battles, but no one can refuse to admire the loyalty of the writer to ideals and doctrines that he worshipped in youth, and which, in his old age, still appeal a* strongly to him as they did in the happy times of yon? u when all the world was young, \vith the fresh blood of Romanticism flowing through its veins*

It is probably quite impossible for any one born aftrr the period when the influence of the movement wa*

INTRODUCTION

still strongly felt, although already the Realistic school had displaced it as a powerful factor, to realise how deep was the hold it had upon men. The fascination it had exercised upon the fathers was felt by the sons, in a less degree, no doubt, but yet so strongly that it coloured their views of life and dictated their admira- tions. Hugo was the supreme master, and his dramas the most perfect and the most wonderful plays that had ever been written, Shakespeare's not excepted. Alfred de Musset's poems were on the tongues of all the youth of that day, and not one of them but knew his " Namouna " and his u Rolla " by heart. Imagination ran riot, and passion was the greatest thing on earth. The notion of beauty was not the calm and superb one taught by the Greek, but the more restless, more varied notion of the mediaevalist, interpreted by his modern admirer. Classicists were no longer insulted, it is true, but the works of Racine were considered inferior to those of the recent poets. There was one faith Romanticism ; and one apostle and high-priest of that faith Victor Hugo.

Now that being the case some twenty years or more after the memorable performance of " Hcrnani," which unquestionably marks an epoch in French literature,

A HISTORY OF ROMANTICISM

though it was not, as fondly fancied by Theophile Gautier, as great an event as the first performance of the " Cid," it is not to be wondered at that the con- temporaries of Victor Hugo, the young fellows who were inspired by him, the comrades who aided in secur- ing the ultimate triumph of his much discussed play, should have been carried away by an enthusiasm that strikes the calm looker-on of the present time as exag- gerated and even absurd. There was absurdity in it, to a certain extent, and no one recognises the fact more readily than Gautier himself in this very volume, but the mainspring of that enthusiasm, as is also set forth in the present work, was absolute and genuine love of art in all its forms, and the resolve to do or die for that art and the triumph of the ideas it represented.

It is not, then, a philosophical, a critical history of the great movement that is to be looked for in Gau- tier's pages, but something akin, in its way, to the old warrior's simple tale of his expedition. Gautier relates the conquest of the French mind by the Romanticist phalanx, and in the telling his own prejudices and pre- possessions manifest themselves artlessly. He feels an amount of admiration for some of these long forgotten heroes of 1830 that the modern reader finds himself un-

INTRODUCTION

able to share, and even, at times, to understand. Who, for instance, that has ever conscientiously waded through some of Petrus BorePs productions, can but wonder that Gautier should find so much in him, or that he should have been looked upon as one of the glories of the new school ? Philothee O'Neddy is no longer a name to conjure with, and even Gerard de Nerval is not much read now* Men have arisen since those days whose works appeal, far more directly and far more effectively to the modern mind than those sup- posed masterpieces, doomed to early forgetfulness. The whole tone has changed. The erratic flights of fancy that delighted the Romanticists and their admir- ing readers pall upon the modern mind athirst for the real and the accurate. The French public itself has returned to the psychologists and the analysts, and is inclined to leave the idealists severely alone.

The title of the book might well have been more modest, perhaps, though there is no trace of conceit in Gautier. It might have been called Memoirs or Reminiscences, and indeed the latter would have de- scribed it most aptly, for it is the past that Gautier is evoking, with its memories of battle and victory, of struggle and temporary defeat, of magnificent success

A HISTORY OF ROMANTICISM

and intoxicating praises sung by an applauding multi- tude. It is also the tale of true friendship and hearty comradeship; of enthusiastic collaboration and gener- ous self-effacement for the sake of the master or of a beloved fellow-worker. It is a paean in honour of the school that endowed France with a new poetry, a new form of painting, a new sense of nature, and recalled to its literature and to its art, as well as to the daily life of the people, a keener sense of the beautiful and a more tolerant notion of the differences in taste.

It is a pathetic story, on the whole, not only because it tells of a splendid dawn and a glorious noonday, soon followed by a sombre crepuscule, but also because it is told mostly of the dead. Gautier might have quoted Goethe, whom he admires so much and with such good reason :

* But, ah ! they cannot hear my closing song

For whom its earlier notes were tried. Departed is, alas! the friendly throng, And dumb the echoes all that once replied ! **

for nearly all those with whom he had consorted in those never to be forgotten da^s had passed away into the Valley of the Shadow of Death. One by one he had seen them go ; one by one he had followed them to

INTRODUCTION

their last resting-place, and in the columns of his paper he had told of the talents and of the genius of one after another. The loneliness of old age was coming upon him ; the solitude of the man who has outlived most of his contemporaries was beginning to enshroud him ; the approach of his own end was unconsciously making itself felt and lent to his accents greater tenderness and depth. Standing, though he was not aware of it, upon the very threshold of the tomb, the remembrances of that hot youth of art and battle crowded thick and fast into his memory. He was again a student in Rioult's studio; again he was receiving from the hands of Gerard de Nerval the magic square of red cardboard that was to admit him to the long expected first per- formance of cc Hernani ; " again he was in that theatre crammed with friends and foes, ready to hiss or to applaud, and he, a striking figure in his brilliant costume, the memorable costume, was leading the hurricane of cheers that greeted every passage, and drowned in its roar the fierce execrations of the adversaries.

The accounts Gautier has given in this book are full of these reminiscences. The first performance of ct Hernani " is the one shining mark in his life. It was the evening that settled his fate, the occasion on

A HISTORY OF ROMANTICISM

which he definitely threw in his lot with the innovators; and although more than forty years had passed since that night, his enthusiasm was in no wise abated and his delight in the play was wholly undiminished.

It was therefore quite in accordance with the doc- trines and the practice of that dramatic school to which he belonged, and of which he was one of the chiefest ornaments, that the last words he ever penned should have been about " Hernani," and that the old happiness should have returned to him at the very moment when his busy hand and fertile brain were stilled by death.

He had devoted himself to art, with such complete devotion that it has actually been made a reproach to him by some who cannot understand the circumstances under which Gautier became a Romanticist, and who fail to grasp the simple fact that the doctrine of art for art's sake was a necessary consequence of the sad con- dition into which such matters had fallen at that time. Faithful to art all his days, he found, as he says himself, that it was ever faithful to him and gave him a happi- ness he sought for elsewhere in vain.

Very touching too is the more than friendly feeling he has preserved towards all those who were comrades of his in the bygone days, all those who fought side by

INTRODUCTION

side with him, who shared in the joys and in the troubles of the time, who were happy or wretched, but who were devoted like himself to the ideals set up by the master and accepted by the ardent disciples. Modest in all that regards himself, he is generous in his praise of his fellow-workers, and the friends of the survivors of whom he spoke in such tender terms must have been grateful indeed to him for the tributes he so willingly and lovingly laid on the new-made graves. There is a recurrence of the old friendly comradeship on every page of the work, and this lends to it a special value, beyond the interest it possesses as a memorial of a brilliant time and a tumultuous one, too, when such deep changes were being introduced not into French literature only, but into every form and manifestation of the artistic instinct and artistic powers of the nation. The various portions of the volume were published at different times and in different papers. The first three chapters appeared in the Bien public of March 3, 10, and 17, 1872, and the chapter on " Hernani," left unfinished, was published in the same paper on Nov- ember 6 of the same year. The various sketches of Romanticist celebrities, which are all connected with the history of the movement, were written for different

A HISTORY OF ROMANTICISM

papers and at different dates between 1849 while the study on the Progress of French Poetry since 1830 formed part of the Report on the Progress of Letters in France, to which Sylvestre de Sacy, Paul Feval, and Edouard Thierry also contributed. This portion was republished in 1874, under its present title, in the volume on the History of Romanticism.

A History of Romanticism

HISTORT OF ROMANTICISM

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THE FIRST MEETING

are but a few veterans left of the men who, in answer to the call of Her- nani's horn, followed him up the steep slopes of Romanticism and so valiantly defended the defiles against the attacks of the Classi- cists ; and even these are disappearing day by day like the wearers of the Saint Helena medal. I had the honour of being enrolled in those youthful bands that fought for idealism, poesy, and freedom in art, with an enthusiasm, a bravery, and a devotion unknown nowa- days. The glorious leader still stands like a statue upon its bronze pedestal, but the remembrance of the private soldiers will ere long be lost, and it is the duty

A HISTORY OF ROMANTICISM

of those who formed part of the Grand Army of literature to relate their forgotten exploits.

It must be difficult for the present generation to imagine the state of excitement of all minds at that time. A movement analogous to that of the Renais- sance was taking place. A sap of new life was running hotly ; everything was germinating, budding, blooming at one and the same time ; intoxicating scents filled the air, which itself went to the head ; men were drunk with lyrism and art. It seemed as though the great lost secret had been found again; and it was, for Poetiy had been lost and now was found.

It is impossible to realise the depth of insignificance and colourlessness literature had fallen into 5 and the case of painting was no better. David's latest pupils were engaged in smearing with sickly colouring the old Grseco-Roman stock models. The Classicists professed admiration for these masterpieces, but could not repress a yawn as they looked upon them, though they did not, on that account, show themselves any the more tolerant of the artists of the new school, whom they called a tattooed savages " and accused of painting with " a drunken broom," Nor were their insults left

unrequited, and " mummies ** made up for u savages/*

THE FIRST MEETING

while both sides entertained the most profound con- tempt for each other.

At that time my literary vocation had not asserted itself, and I should have been greatly surprised had any one told me I would become a journalist, for such a prospect would have had little attraction for me. I intended to be a painter, and, with this purpose in view, I had entered Rioult's studio, situated near the Protes- tant church in the Rue Saint-Antoine, and which its nearness to the College Charlemagne, where I was completing my education, made me prefer on account of the facility with which I could combine studio and school work. I have often since then regretted that I did not follow my first impulse.

A man sees for himself how much he has accom- plished, and reality, ever severe, impresses upon him what is his exact value ; but he may dream of how much more beautiful, grander, and magnificent work he might have been the author, for if the page has been written all over, the canvas has remained spotlessly white, and there is nothing to prevent one from supposing, like Frenhofer in Balzac's cc The Unknown Masterpiece," that there shines upon it a Venus by the side of whom Titian's nude women would be but shapeless daubs.

% 17

A HISTORY OF ROMANTICISM

It is an innocent illusion, a secret subterfuge of self- love which harms no one and is always a bit consoling, for it is ever comforting to say to one's self, when the brush has been discarded in favour of the pen, " What a great painter I should have made ! " I can only hope that my readers will not share that opinion and wish that I had stuck to my original purpose.

Men read a great deal in the studios of that day, The students were fond of literature, and their special training leading them to close communion with nature, they were better fitted to appreciate the images and the rich colouring of the new poesy. They had not the least objection to the exact and picturesque details that were so repugnant to the Classicists, for accustomed to their own free speech, full of technical expressions, the crude word in nowise shocked them. I speak of the young and enthusiastic students, for of course there were docile grinds, faithful to Chompre's Dictionary and to the tendon of Achilles, who were well thought of by the professor and held up by him as examples to be followed ; but they were not in the least popular, and glances of contempt were cast upon their palettes, on

which glowed neither Veronese green, Indian yellow,

THE FIRST MEETING

Smyrna lake, nor any of the seditious colours proscribed by the Institute.

Chateaubriand may be looked upon as the ancestor, or, if you prefer it, the Sachem of French Romanticism. In the " Genius of Christianity " he restored Gothic art; in "The Natchez" he opened up Nature, so long closed to art ; in " Rene " he invented melancholy and modern passion. Unfortunately, his most poetic mind lacked the wings of poetry verse. Victor Hugo did have these wings, and of vast spread of pinion, too, stretching from one end to the other of the lyrical heavens. He rose, soared, circled, and swept about with a freedom and a power that recalled the eagle's flight.

What a wonderful time that was ! Walter Scott was then enjoying the full tide of success ; men were studying the mysteries of Goethe's "Faust," which, to use Mme. de Stael's words, contains everything and even something more than that ; Shakespeare was being discovered under the somewhat revised translation by Letourneur; and Lord Byron's poems, "The Corsair," " Lara," " The Giaour," " Manfred," " Beppo," " Don Juan," brought the East, not yet become common- place, to us. It was all so youthful, so new, so richly

A HISTORY OF ROMANTICISM

coloured, and of so strange and intoxicating a savour, that it turned our heads and we seemed to be enter- ing into unknown worlds. On every page we came upon subjects for pictures which we made haste to sketch stealthily, for they were not to our mas- ter's taste, and would have earned for us, had they been seen, a smart rap of the mahl-stick over the head.

It was in this state of mind that I worked at the figure, while reciting to my neighbour at the easel "King John's Joust," or "The Burgrave's Hunt." My heart was with the Romanticist school, although I was not yet affiliated to it. The preface to cc Crom- well" blazed before me like the Tables of the Law on Mount Sinai, and the arguments it contained ap- peared to me unanswerable. The insults hurled by the inferior papers of the Classicist press against the youthful master whom I even then, and rightly, looked upon as the greatest poet in France, filled me with fiercest rage. I burned to go forth to fight the hydra of old fogyism, like the German painters with Corne- lius at their head, mounted on Pegasus, after the fashion of the four sons of Aymon in the fresco by Kaulbach, in the new Pinacothek in Munich. I

THE FIRST MEETING

should, however, have preferred a less classical steed, Ariosto's hippogriff, for instance.

The rehearsals of " Hernani " were going on, and judging by the excitement already aroused by the play, it was easy to foresee that the first performances would be riotous. My dearest wish, my highest ambition was to be present at the battle, to fight unseen in some corner for the good cause ; but the tickets were re- ported to be at the author's disposal, at least for the first three performances, and the idea of asking him for one struck me, an unknown student in a painter's studio, as altogether beyond the bounds of audacity.

Happily, Gerard de Nerval, with whom I had formed at the College Charlemagne one of those youthful friendships that are ended by death alone, happened to pay me one of the brief, unexpected calls he was in the habit of making, in the course of which, like a tame swallow entering by the window, he would flutter round the room, uttering little cries, and soon bolt out again ; for his lightsome, winged nature, ap- parently borne up by the breezes, like Euphorion, the son of Helen and Faust, plainly suffered if obliged to remain still, and the best way' to have a chat with him was to accompany him on his walk. At this time

A HISTORY OF ROMANTICISM

he was already an important personage 5 fame had come to him while still in college. At seventeen he had had a volume of verse published, and on reading the translation of " Faust " made by that youth who was scarce more than a lad, the great man of Weimar had deigned to say that he had never so well under- stood his own work. Gerard was acquainted with Victor Hugo, was received at his house, and deservedly enjoyed the Master's confidence, for never was there a more refined, more devoted or more loyal man.

Gerard was charged with the duty of recruiting young fellows for that first evening's performance, which promised to be stormy, and was already arousing so much animosity. Was it not natural that youth should be opposed to old age, the long-haired heads to the bald ones, enthusiasm to routine, the future to the past ?

He carried in his pockets, stuffed with more books, old volumes, pamphlets, and note-books for he wrote as he walked than were those of Colline in "Life in Bohemia," a lot of small squares of red paper stamped with a mysterious signature : a Spanish word, Hierro^ which means cc iron," inscribed on one corner. This motto, the Castilian haughtiness of which was un-

THE FIRST MEETING

commonly well suited to Hernani's character, and which he might have borne, meant also that in the fight one must be frank, brave, and reliable as a sword.

I do not think I ever in the whole course of my life experienced such lively joy as when Gerard, taking from the package six of these red paper squares, handed them to me with a solemn air, urging me at the same time to bring trusted men only. I answered on my life for the small group, for the squad the command of which was given to me.

Among my fellow-students in the studio, were two ferocious Romanticists who would willingly have fed upon the body of a member of the Academy, and among my classmates at the College Charlemagne two young poets who were secretly cultivating rich rimes, exact expressions, and accurate metaphors, ter- rified the while lest these misdeeds should cause them to be disinherited by their parents. These four I en- rolled, after exacting from them an oath to give no quarter to the Philistines j a cousin of mine completed the number of our little band, which, I need not say, behaved valiantly.

It is not, however, my intention to relate now the

great battle round which a legend has already been

A HISTORY OF ROMANTICISM

formed. It shall have a chapter to itself. I am of opinion that the frontispiece of this History of Ro- manticism, begun somewhat in chance fashion, for I have been led to recall these unforgettable memories by the revival of Ruy Bias " (at the Odeon The- atre, February 19, 1872), should be the radiant figure of him, then quite young, to whom I said, as did Dante to Vergil, "Thou art my Master and my author," with the features and the mien of those bygone days.

My " Hernani " record, thirty campaigns, thirty stormy performances, almost gave me the right to be presented to the great leader. It could easily be managed: Gerard de Nerval or Petrus Borel, whose acquaintance I had recently made, would either of them readily take me to the house, but at the thought I was filled with overpowering timidity, and dreaded the fulfilment of a wish so long caressed. When anything happened to prevent the meetings arranged with Gerard or Petrus, or both of them, for the pur- pose of presenting me, I felt renewed comfort, as if relieved of a burden, and I breathed freely again.

Victor Hugo had been compelled, owing to the number of visitors consequent on the performances of

THE FIRST MEETING

" Hernani," to leave the peaceful retreat he dwelt in, at the back of a garden full of trees, in the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Chatnps, and had settled in a pro- jected new street in the Francis I quarter, the Rue Jean-Goujon, which at that time had but one house,

that occupied by the poet. All around stretched the

almost desert Champs-Elysees, a solitude favourable to wanderings and meditations.

Twice I ascended the stairs slowly, oh ! so slowly, as if my boots had been soled with lead. I could not breathe, and I could hear my heart thump- ing in my breast, while a cold sweat came out on my temples. On reaching the door, and as I was about to pull the bell, I was seized with panicky terror. I turned round and bolted down the stairs four steps at a time, pursued by my acolytes, who were laughing fit to split their sides.

The third attempt was more successful. I had begged my companions to give me time to recover, and I had sat down upon the steps, for my legs were giving way and refused to bear my weight, when suddenly the door opened and in a blaze of light, like Phoebus and Apollo issuing from the gates of Dawn, there appeared on the dark landing Victor Hugo himself in all his glory !

A HISTORY OF ROMANTICISM

Like Esther before Ahasuerus, I nearly fainted. Hugo could not extend towards me, as did the satrap to the lovely Jewess, his long golden sceptre, for the very good reason that he had no golden sceptre, where- at I wondered. He smiled, but did not seem surprised, accustomed as he was to meeting daily, as he took his walks abroad, poets in a fainting state, artist students blushing crimson or pale as death, and even grown men who remained speechless or able only to stammer a few words. With the most exquisite courtesy, he made me rise, and giving up his walk showed us the way into his study.

Heinrich Heine relates that intending to call upon the great Goethe, he had long rehearsed in his own mind the fine speeches he proposed to speak to him, but that once he was introduced into his presence the only thing that occurred to him was to say : " The plum trees on the road from lenato Weimar bear plums that are excellent for the quenching of the thirst." Whereat the Jupiter-Mansuetus of German poetry had gently smiled, more flattered perhaps by this crazy piece of nonsense than he would have been by a set, coldly turned eulogy. My own eloquence did not reach

beyond the bounds of dumbness, although I too had

THE FIRST MEETING

often rehearsed, during long evenings, the lyrical apos- trophes with which I had meant to greet Victor Hugo when I should meet him for the first time.

After I had somewhat recovered myself, I was able to take part in the conversation begun between Hugo, Gerard, and Petrus. Gods, kings, pretty women and great poets may be stared at more freely than other people without their being annoyed at it, and I examined Hugo with an intense admiration that did not appear to be unpleasant to him. He recognised the painter's glance taking notes in order to fix for ever a look, an appearance, a moment he desires not to forget.

In the Romanticist host as in the Army of Italy there were none but youths. Most of the privates were not even of age, and the oldest of the band was the commander-in-chief himself, then twenty-eight years old, which was the age of Bonaparte, and also that of Hugo when I met him.

I have written somewhere : " It is rare that a poet or an artist is known under his first and attractive aspect. Fame comes to him late, when already the fatigue of life, the long struggles and the tortures of passion have changed his original mien. It is a worn, withered mask he leaves behind him, marked by every

A HISTORY OF ROMANTICISM

grief he has endured with a wound or a wrinkle as with stigmata. It is this last image of him, which has its own special beauty, that men remember." I have been fortunate enough to be acquainted with all the poets of the modern Pleiades, whose early looks are now forgot, in all the bloom of their youth, their beauty, and their charm.

What first struck one in Victor Hugo was the ^ruly monumental brow that crowned his serious, placid face like a pediment of white marble. It had not, it is true, the proportions given it later by David d' Angers and other artists, with the object of accentuating in the poet's face the marks of genius, but it really was of superhuman beauty and breadth. The mightiest thoughts might be written upon it, and wreaths of gold and laurel rest upon it as upon the brow of a god or of a Caesar. It bore the sign of power. It was framed in by some- what long light brown hair. Hugo wore neither beard, mustaches, whiskers, nor tuft on the lower lip ; his face, remarkably pale, was clean shaved. It was marked and illumined by two tawny eyes like the eyes of an eagle; the lips were sinuous, with arching corners, and firm and wilful in outline. When opened by a smile,

they allowed dazzlingly white teeth to show. His

THE FIRST MEETING

dress consisted of a black frock-coat, gray trousers, and a turned-down shirt-collar, a get-up at once most simple and correct. Indeed no one would have suspected this thorough gentleman of being the leader of the hairy, bearded bands that were the terror of the smooth- chinned bourgeois.

In this wise did Victor Hugo appear unto me at our first meeting, and his image has remained ineffaceable in my memory. I carefully preserve that handsome, youthful, smiling portrait of him, radiant with genius and surrounded with a halo of glory.

A HISTORY OF ROMANTICISM

THE INNER CIRCLE

NOW that you have been presented with due ceremony to the chief of the school, who has received you with his usual graciousness and affability, would you like to meet a group of the disciples, every one filled with the most perfervid en- thusiasm ? Only, if you happen to admire Racine more than Shakespeare and Calderon, you had better keep the fact to yourself, for tolerance is not accounted a virtue by neophytes.

In a small room with not enough chairs for the guests, met a number of young fellows who were really young, and so far different from the younger men of to-day, who are all more or less over fifty. The ham- mock in which the owner of the place enjoyed his siesta, and the narrow couch on which dawn often sur- prised him as he reached the last page of a volume of verse, partially made up for the lack of seating facilities.

The guests spoke more comfortably standing, and the

THE INNER CIRCLE

gestures of the orators or reciters gained in breadth. Of course it would not do to throw out the arm too far, or one would strike the sloping ceiling.

The room was poor, but its poverty was proud and not devoid of adornments. A multiple frame of var- nished pine contained sketches by Eugene and Achille Deveria ; near this frame a gilded one set off a head painted by Louis Boulanger after an original by Titian or Giorgione ; it was painted on board, boldly, and was of splendid tone. On a portion of the wall a piece of Bohemian leather, which did not pretend to act the part of a hanging, displayed, for the delight of the painters, a ruddy shimmer of gold and changing tones in the dark corner.

The mantelpiece was adorned with two Rouen-ware jars, filled with flowers. A skull, that looked as if it might have been removed from the hand of one of Spagnoletto's Magdalens so livid was the sunbeam that fell upon it took the place of a clock. If it did not indicate the time, at least it made one reflect upon its irreparable flight. It was a translation into Romanticist verse of the symbolism of Horace's line.

The medallion portraits of the members, the work of Jehan du Seigneur I beg you to note carefully the

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"h," for it is characteristic of the times, oiled in order to destroy the crude look of the plaster, to colour them, as smokers and sculptors say, were hung on either side of the mirror and in the window recess, where the light touched them in a way peculiarly favourable to the relief.

What has become of these medallions, the work of a hand now cold in death, from originals that have disappeared or few of whom, at least, still survive? No doubt these plaster portraits were broken in the rude handling consequent on the frequent moves in the course of the odysseys of adventurous lives, for at that time not one of us was rich enough to secure for that collection that nowadays would be of such value, both as souvenirs and from the artistic point of view such immortality as bronze bestows. But when end- less youth opens up before one its boundless horizon, no one suspects that the present, one expends with such lavish hand, may some day be history, and thus many an interesting memento is lost by the wayside.

On a modest set of shelves of wild-cherry wood, hung by cords, shone, among a few choice volumes, a copy of C Cromwell," with a friendly dedication, signed V. H. The veneration of Protestants for the Bible,

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or that of Mohammedans for the Koran did not surpass mine for that volume, which was indeed to me the book of books, the work that contained the true doctrine.

The assemblage generally comprised Gerard de Ner- val, Jehan du Seigneur, Augustus MacKeat, Philothee O'Neddy (every man altered his name a bit in order to give it an air), Napoleon Tom, Joseph Bouchardy, Ce- lestin Nanteuil ; somewhat later, Theophile Gautier and a few more, and finally Petrus Borel himself. Of these young fellows, bound by the tenderest friendship, some were painters, others sculptors, others engravers, others architects or at least studying architecture. For myself, as I have already said, standing at the parting of the ways, I hesitated between the two paths, that is, between poetry and painting, both of them equally detested of parents.

Nevertheless, though I had not crossed the Rubicon, I was already making more verse than sketches; and it appeared to me to be pleasanter to paint with words than with colours. For one thing, when the sitting was over, one had not to clean up the palette and to wash one's brushes.

Nor was I the only one in the small company who suffered from uncertainty of vocation. Joseph Bou-

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chardy, then unknown, was studying mezzotint engrav- ing under the Englishman Reynolds, the engraver of the beautiful plate of Gericault's " The Wreck of the c Medusa,' " but he felt himself irresistibly drawn towards the drama, and every one knows how fully success justified this imperious command of instinct. Bouchardy, " Saltpetre-heart," as Petrus called him in the preface to the " Rhapsodies," in which he has a word for every one of his comrades as he goes along, did not become a mezzotint engraver, though he studied the process thoroughly ; he became the Shakespeare of the Boulevard, and one might say that in his works are to be met with the deep black tones of English engraving. Petrus was also seeking to find his proper career. From the architect's studio he had passed to that of Eugene Deveria, where he tried his hand at painting ; but if I may use such a classical expression in a History of Romanticism, we suspected him even then of secretly courting the Muse. Gerard was the only man of letters among us, in the meaning the word had in the middle of the eighteenth century. He was subjective rather than objective; thought more of the idea than of the image; understood nature somewhat in the fashion of Jean- Jacques Rousseau 5 in his rektions with mankind, cared

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but little for paintings and statues j and, spite of his con- stant relations with Germany and his intimacy with Goethe, had remained far more French than any of us, in all the characteristics of race, temperament, and mind.

This interpenetration of poetry by art was and is still one of the characteristic traits of the new school, and explains why its first adherents were recruited from the ranks of the artists rather than those of the men of letters. Innumerable objects, images, and comparisons believed inexpressible in words, entered into our lan- guage and have remained in it. The scope of litera- ture was enlarged, and now within its mighty compass it embraces the whole sphere of art.

Such, then, was my state of mind at that time ; art attracted me by the seductive forms it offered me for the realisation of my dream of beauty, while the ascendency of the Master drew me in his luminous wake, and made me forget that to be a great poet is more difficult still than to be a great painter.

The impassible Goethe experienced a similar indeci- sion in his attempts and efforts to assimilate a new form of expression, and in his Venetian epigrams he wrote : ct I have tried many things ; I have drawn a

great deal, I have engraved on copper and painted in _ _

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oils ; I have often also modelled in clay, but I lacked perseverance and learned nothing, accomplished noth- ing. In one art only have I become almost a master, the art of writing in German ; and thus it comes about that, unfortunate poet, I am wasting life and art upon the most rebellious matter. What had fate meant to make of me? It is a rash question, for generally it does not intend to make much of most men. Was it a poet? It would have succeeded in doing so, had not our speech proved so utterly rebellious."

May I also, after so many years of labour and of re- searches in various directions, have become almost a master in one single art, that of writing in French ! But such ambitions are forbidden me.

In every group there is a central individuality, round which the others cluster and gravitate like a planetary system around its sun. Petrus Borel was our sun ; none of us sought to escape his attraction ; as soon as a man had been caught in the whirl, he went on re- volving with singular satisfaction, as if he had been obeying a natural law. He felt something of the in- toxication of the whirling dervish spinning in the cen- tre of his fustanella, that the rapidity of his waltzing causes to expand like a bell.

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He was rather older than I, some three or four years older, perhaps, of medium stature, well made, with an elegant figure, and meant to wear a brown mantle in the streets of Seville. Not that he resembled an Almaviva or a Lindor; on the contrary, he was grave as a Castilian, and seemed always as though he had just emerged from one of Velasquez 5 paintings. When he put on his hat he seemed to be covering himself in the presence of the King, like a grandee of Spain ; his lofty courtesy set him apart, but he never wounded other people's feelings, for he stopped just at the point when courtesy would have become either coldness or impertinence.

His was a face never to be forgotten, once seen. Young and serious, perfectly regular, of olive com- plexion, with faint amber tones like an old master's painting acquiring an agate surface, it was lighted by great eyes, shining and sad, the eyes of an Abencerrage thinking of Granada. The best description that I can give of these eyes of his is that they were exotic or nostalgic. His bright red lips bloomed like a flower under his mustaches, and imparted a spark of life to features Oriental in their immobility.

A beard, fine, silky, full, scented with benzoin, and

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cared for as a Sultan's beard rrtight be, framed in a dark shadow his pale and handsome face. A beard! A very ordinary matter in France nowadays, but at that time there were but two in the country : Eugene Deveria's and Petrus Borers. It required absolutely heroic self-possession and contempt of the multitude to wear one. And mark that when I say beard, I do not mean mutton-chop or fin-shaped whiskers, or a tip or a tuft, but a genuine, full, complete beard, one to make a man shudder.

I, beardless one, with but a light mustache on the corners of my upper lip, I admired that splendid crop of hair. I must even confess that I, who had never coveted anything, did feel the meanest jealousy of it, and that I did my best to counterbalance its effect by a Merovingian superabundance of hair on my head. Petrus wore his short, almost cropped, so as to make his beard more striking still ; in this direction, there- fore, I had the chance of hitting upon something new, singular, and even somewhat scandalous.

The presence of Petrus Borel produced an indefin- able impression, the cause of which I managed at last to discover. He was not a contemporary; nothing in him reminded one of a modern man ; he seemed

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always to be emerging from the past, and one could have sworn he had just bidden good-by to his ances- tors. I have not met with a similar expression in any one else. It was difficult to take him for a French- man born in the nineteenth century, but quite easy, on the other hand, to believe him a Spaniard, an Arab, or an Italian of the fifteenth.

Thanks to his beard, his powerful yet gentle voice, and his dress, picturesquely worn, without, however, being too different from the fashion of the day, and always tastefully kept to sombre colours, Petrus Borel inspired me with exceeding awe, and I treated him with an amount of respect quite unusual between young fel- lows nearly of an age. He talked well, in a strange and paradoxical way, used words deliberately odd, and delivered his remarks with a certain rough eloquence. He had not yet taken to baying at the moon, and to sickening people. I thought him " remarkably clever," and had concluded that he would be the particular great man of our company. He was slowly elaborat- ing the " Rhapsodies " in mysterious secrecy, intend- ing that they should suddenly blaze forth like the lightning, and blind, or at least dazzle, the astounded bourgeoisie.

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Until the day of their publication should dawn, Petrus, who was the most thorough specimen of the Romanticist idealist, and who might have posed for one of Byron's heroes, used to promenade around, fol- lowed by his train, admired of all, proud of his genius and his beauty, one end of his cloak thrown over his shoulder, and casting behind him a shadow on which it would not have been the part of prudence to step. How many a time, at the performances of " Hernani," I regretted that Borel was not playing the part of the bandit beloved of Dona Sol 5 for he would have admirably represented the mountain hawk, the hero of the Sierras, struggling against fate ; and handsome indeed would he have looked, wearing the cloak, the green-sleeved jerkin, the red breeches, and the som- brero pulled down over his eyes!

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A STRANGE figure also was Joseph Bou- chardy. He did not look as if he had been born in France, but rather on the banks of the Indus or the Ganges, so dark and tawny was he. I know not what mysterious sun had browned his face, and had concentrated all its rays upon him after break- ing through the mists above. All he needed, to look like the Maharajah of Lahore, was a dress of white muslin, a Cashmere shawl twisted around his head by way of turban, and a diamond nose-ring. When he had on his blue coat with gilt buttons, and his black and white checked waistcoat and trousers, he seemed to be disguised, like the dispossessed princes of British India, who may be seen wandering with disconsolate air on the London pavements. His hair, of a blue black, produced greenish tints as it fell on his golden temples. His eyes, like jet stars, shone black on the yellow sclerotic, and his face was framed in with a

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light, downy, silky, fine beard, every hair of which might have been counted as in a Hindoo minia- ture. He looked infinitely more like a disciple of Calidaca or of King Soudraka, the poet with the ele- phant ears, than an enthusiastic pupil of Victor Hugo. So we sometimes used to poke fun at him, when it was time to go, by saying : u Maharajah, your High- ness' palanquin is waiting, and the bearers are jolly well bored."

He was short, thin, supple, with the action of a black Javanese panther ; his somewhat small head turned freely upon a long neck carelessly wrapped round with a white foulard cravat.

His barbaric and fierce mien was purely picturesque, and did not betoken the least inward trace of savagery. Never did there beat in man's breast a warmer, more tender, or more unselfish heart than that of this young tiger of the jungle. Besides, every one of us, though at bottom the best of fellows, loved to look like grim rufflers, if only to instil wholesome fear in the breasts of the bourgeois.

Like every member of our society, Bouchardy knew every line of Hugo's play, and could have recited " Hernani *' from beginning to end ; a performance that

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then surprised no one, for we often performed the play ourselves, each man taking one of the parts, and, by Saint John d'Avila, no prompter was needed ! He was, however, less of a lyrist than the rest of us, who were absolutely crazy about poetry, and, provided we were satisfied with the style, cared little enough for the subject itself, Bouchardy was very much taken up with play-writing, drawing up plans of imaginary dramas, blocking out scenes, arranging settings, creating innumerable vicissitudes, involving his characters in ap- parently inextricable situations, setting himself the task of finding a way out of them, keeping back his effects for three acts so as to bring them on at the exact mo- ment, cutting masked doors in walls for the entrance of the expected personage, aud trap-doors in the floors for his exits.

He wrought out in advance, as if it were one of Anne Radcliffe's castles, the curious edifice in which his heroes and heroines were later on to meet, to love, to hate, to fight, to trap each other, to commit murders, or to marry ; providing it with a donjon, turrets, subter- ranean dungeons, secret passages, winding stairs* vaulted halls, hiding-places in the thick walls, mortuary vaults, and chapels in the crypts. We used to charge him

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with turning his plays into wooden models, and he would laugh, saying that it might well be the best thing to do.

Bouchardy had the artless yet complex temperament that led the workmen of the Middle Ages to intertwine the inextricable "forests" of the cathedrals, and to enclose in the cases of clocks the world of wheels, weights, counter-weights, springs, and pendulums that caused the sun, moon and stars, angels, the seasons, and the four apostles to move, and that occasionally even showed the time. In the drama, in which he gave proof of unquestionable power, it was the structural difficulties that delighted him above all things. The very fact that the plot of a play was simple made him condemn it as defective, and he strove to cram each act full of incidents, vicissitudes, and complications. When the Gaiete gave "The Bell-ringer of Saint Paul's," one of the greatest, most durable, and most profitable successes of the Boulevard drama, I was already on the staff of the Presse, and it fell to me to perform the difficult task of describing Bouchardy's masterpiece.

After writing nine columns I had got half-way through the first act only; so, Bouchardy being a neighbour of

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mine, I went to him in order to have him guide me through the maze of events. After a couple of hours spent in marches and counter-marches, he owned to being as much puzzled as myself, for he had not his plan of the play at hand. I am bound to say that the golden-skinned and indigo-haired monster smiled with a certain amount of pride, and appeared to be flattered by the thought that a man might lose himself in his work just as in the catacombs, and seek in vain in the darkness for any exit. It would have afforded him much satisfaction to see me starve to death in it, but I refused to give him that pleasure, and returned to the light of day by breaking through the opaque vault at the point I had reached.

A few years later, in Spain, at Jaen, a grim, African- looking town still enclosed in the remains of Moorish walls with saw-like crenelations, and hills as tawny as a lion's skin, and where a man never dreams of going to purchase a bundle of pimento on the public square with- out his navaja in his belt and a carbine on his shoulder, I saw on a wall, between the parador and the cathedral, a huge poster bearing these words : El campanero de San Pablo per el illustrisstmo seHor Don Jose Bouchardy* Bouchardy's fame had crossed not only the Pyrenees,

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but the Sierra Morena likewise, the range of mountains wherein Don Quixote imitated the penance of Amadis upon the Rock of Poverty, and where Sancho found Cardenio's valise by the dead mule. Now that fame was romantically blazing in Jaen, after a classical per- formance of " Merope." At Valladolid, I had come upon " Hernani," translated by Don Eugenio de Ochoa, bearing himself as proudly there as on the stage of the Rue Richelieu. The pupil was marching on before the master upon the roads of Spain, like a herald-at-arms.

At this time Bouchardy would never have dreamed of such success ; he was still engraving in mezzotint under Reynolds. Save Gerard de Nerval, not one of us had made a name, but we felt as if borne by the wind towards a brilliant future. The only reproach we addressed to the coming author of u Gaspardo the Fisherman," " The Bell-ringer of Saint Paul's/' " Christopher the Swede," " Longsword," and " Paris the Comedian," was that he did not write in verse, and indeed, that he did not write, properly speaking. Wholly devoted to dramatic combinations, he neglected his style, a rare occurrence in the Romanticist school, although many Classicists charged it with being igno- rant of French.

dbttr 4r sfc 4r db 4r & i 4r d8r*^rtlf4rdb dbtbdbtfctl? &&

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Sculpture is assuredly of all the arts that one which lends itself least readily to the expression of the Roman- ticist Idea. It seems to have received its final form from antiquity. Having been developed under an anthropomorphous religion, in which beauty deified was made immortal in marble and rose upon the altars, it attained a perfection that can never be surpassed. Never has the hymn of the human form been sung in nobler strophes; the splendid force of form shone with incomparable brilliancy during that period of Greek civilisation, the youth and springtime of human genius.

What can sculpture accomplish without the gods and heroes of mythology, which afford it, with plausible pretexts, the nude forms and the draperies which it needs, and which Romanticism proscribes, or at least did proscribe in those days of early fervour? Every sculptor is necessarily a Classicist j at bottom he always belongs to the religion of the Olympians, and cannot read without deep emotion Heinrich Heine's " Gods in Exile/' I myself, thanks to my studies in plastics, cannot help regretting the ambrosial-haired Zeus rele- gated to the Isle of Pines in the Northern Ocean, Aphrodite imprisoned within the Venusberg, Ampelos

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cellarer to a monastery, and Herakles bank-clerk in Hamburg.

Nevertheless, we did not lack sculptors who sought to introduce truth into idealism, and to get closer to the beauty of nature. David d'Angers, sung by Victor Hugo and Sainte-Beuve in admirable poems, pro- duced his " Maiden at Botzaris' Tomb," his " Philo- poemen," and his great monumental busts, as well as that most characteristic collection of medallions which forms, as it were, a complete iconography of the age. Antonin Moine, Preault, Maindron, Mile, de Fauveau were one and all endeavouring to break the old moulds and to communicate to the clay or the wax the supple- ness of life and the thrill of passion. In our own caenaculum, Jehan du Seigneur represented that austere art which will not yield to fancy, because, feeling itself looked at under every one of its aspects, it may not scamp or conceal anything. Honesty in sculpture has always been obligatory, and Jehan du Seigneur, so accurate, so conscientious, was not the man to fail in this respect.

Jehan du Seigneur let me keep in his name Jean the mediaeval " h " which made him so happy and led him to fancy that he wore the apron of Ervinus of

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Steinbach, working at the carvings on the Strasburg minster Jehan du Seigneur was a young fellow some twenty years of age ; he certainly had barely attained his majority. He had a gentle look, modest and shy as a maiden's ; he was short, but robust, as is generally the case with sculptors who are accustomed to struggle with matter. His dark-brown hair was parted on either side and dressed to a point above his forehead, like a flame that crowns genius, or the top- knot so characteristic of Louis-Philippe. This mode of dressing the hair, which would appear strange to-day, outlined a handsome white brow, glowing with light, and under it shone two velvety black eyes, bathed in the blue fluid of childhood and incomparably sweet. Light mustaches and a light tuft on the chin gave strength to the features, and the somewhat protruding lower jaw indicated tenacity of purpose. Du Seigneur himself, however, grieved unremittingly over the won- drous bloom of his complexion, which was literally of lilies and roses, according to the ancient classical formula.

At that time it was the fashion, in the Romanticist school, for a man to be wan, livid, greenish, and some- what cadaverous, if possible, for thus did one attain

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the fateful, Byronic, Giaour look of one devoured by passion and remorse. Tender-hearted women thought such a one interesting, and, feeling grieved at his ap- proaching fate, abridged the time of waiting for the consummation of happiness in order that he might taste it while still in this world. But rosy health illumined his sweet and lovely face. It is not every one who can have the mien of a Ruthven.

In order to carry out the programme contained in his name, Jehan du Seigneur wore, instead of a waist- coat, a slashed doublet of black velvet, cut to a point, fitting closely and laced behind. It was no more ridiculous, after all, than the waistcoats cut open in heart shape down to the pit of the stomach, and fas- tened by a single button, that were recently the fashion. A jacket with broad velvet facings, and a very full cravat of taffeta, with a great bow, completed this care* fully thought out costume, in which, as the very acme of Romanticist elegance, not a trace of linen was visible. The men of fifty of to-day, and even some who arc older, may remember the jokes directed against the shirt-collar as symbolical of the grocer, the bour- geois, the Philistine, who, with their ears scraped by the triangle of starched linen, seemed to be them-

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selves bringing their decapitated heads like bouquets done up in paper.

It took all Victor Hugo's Olympic majesty and the shudders of terror he inspired to carry off his small turned-down collar a concession to Mrs. Grundy and when the doors were closed, and no profane ones were present, this weakness of the great genius, which connected him with humanity and even with the bour- geoisie, was commented on sadly, and deep sighs welled up from our artistic breasts.

Meanwhile Jehan du Seigneur, instead of attempting a cc Hercules on Mount CEta," was at work upon an tc Orlando furioso " trying to break his bonds, a group of " Esmeralda giving water to Quasimodo," and a bust of Victor, as we called him among ourselves with that tender familiarity that disciples indulge in ; while I, an apprentice poet, addressed to the young sculptor, already a master, the following, among many more verses which I shall not inflict upon the reader:

- Then before the eyes of thine entranced soul, shimmering

with gilt, vaporous in gauze, Such as thy heart sought her in Hugo's work, With her long hair wind-blown and curled, Slender-limbed, quick-footed, wasp-waisted, A true dream of the East, did Esmeralda pass.

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- Roland the brave knight, who, with frothing lips, His

brows bent, rolls his grim and fierce eyes, And on the sharp rocks he has uprooted, Naked, mad with love, his nostrils in- flamed, Brings out the great bones of his mighty chest, And writhes with his enthralled limbs.

" Then the Homeric, Napoleonic head of Victor, our King ! Nay, more : mine own, My Gerard's and Petrus Borel's too, And others that with swift finger, as thou goest, Thou makest live in wax or eke in clay Enough, in times of old, to make man immortal ! "

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THE MIRACULOUS COMRADE

JULES VABRE owes his fame to the announce- ment, on the cover of Petrus Borel's "Rhap- sodies," of his ct Essay on the Incommodiousness of Commodes," a work that never saw the light and may be included in catalogues of oddities with "The Poor Sapper," and Ernest Reyer's treatise " On the Influence of Fishes' tails upon the Undulations of the Sea." Nor has the following stanza of the odelet, addressed to him by Petrus, in these same " Rhapsodies" been forgotten :

t( Now in good sooth, Jules Vabre, Comrade miraculous, To the gaze fastidious Of the clean shaven bourgeois, Must we not crazy seem, In this world in which all men proper are ! Must we not seem passing strange As our own sweet wills we follow ?"

The truth is Jules Vabre might well have amazed bearded men even, had men worn beards in those days, for he was one of the most eccentric persons I can

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remember. He did not sport his Romanticism like a plume, and did not affect any of the truculent airs so much in vogue in the school 5 his fair hair, already somewhat thinned on the forehead, was not very long, nor did his mustaches hang down upon his breast like those of the ancient Breton warriors, but his gray eyes sparkled with mischief, and innumerable little ironical wrinkles played at the corners of his lips, the sides of his nostrils, and the outer corners of his eyes. He often laughed to himself, like Chingachgook, the Mohican, at the comedies that went on in his brain, and when he spoke, one could see a procession of fatidical figures, making faces and cutting capers, bursting with laugh- ter, putting out their tongues, and suddenly vanish- ing like Chinese shadow-pictures. A talk with him gave one exactly the same impression as glancing through Rabelais' " Comical Visions " does. It was absolutely crazy and deeply true, and his extravagant fantocchi lived the most intense life, now comical, now sorrowful.

He was a Romanticist, but a Rabelaisian also, and in the prescribed mingling of the grotesque and the serious, he was always inclined to make the former predominate. In the most serious and innocent way

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he indulged in the wildest practical jokes and fooled the bourgeois with the coolness of Panurge. He also recalled Merckle, whom Goethe considered the most perfect type of Mephistopheles.

But what was the occupation of Jules Vabre, who has long since vanished, and has left no other trace of his passage here below than an ironical announcement of a book and his own name in a dedication ? Was he poet, painter, sculptor, or composer? I do not know a single line of verse, a single picture, a single statue, a single sonata by him. He was an archi- tect ; there were many of them in the " Hernani " host, as sick of the five orders as I was of the three unities. When their ship was overdue, Vabre and his friend Petrus became clerks of works under some contractor, and settled themselves in the first fairly finished room, both to save rent and to enjoy playing at Robinson Crusoe in the very midst of civilisation.

Thus it was that I came upon them in a half-ruin- ous cellar in the Rue Fontaine-au-Roi, which, I suppose, they had undertaken to repair. The yard was filled with rubbish, consisting of beams, bricks, and stones, that greatly impeded my approach. Stumbling

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over the stones and timber, I at last managed to reach the dwelling of my friends, guided by the occasional gleams of light that issued from the air-holes of the cellar. To them the place was a regular grotto in the island of San Juan Fernandez, and not by any means a cellar in the Rue Fontaine-au-Roi. I descended a few- steps and beheld Petrus, pale and haughty, prouder than a Castilian noble, seated by a fire made of boards, while Vabre, kneeling and supporting himself with his hands, his cheeks swollen like those of classical ^Eolus, was blowing up the fire, thus producing the intermittence of light visible from outside. The group so formed, lighted as it was from below, and casting strong shadows, quaintly deformed by the arch of the vaulting, would have furnished Rembrandt, or even Norblin, had Rembrandt been too busy just then, with a subject for an effectively mysterious etching.

Under the ashes was cooking the supper of my two friends, whose sobriety surpassed that of hermits ; the supper consisted of potatoes* u On Sundays, we have salt with them," said Jules Vabre, with an air of proud sensuality; for, after all, salt, like Diogenes* wooden cup, is a luxury ; simple palates do not need

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that stimulant, and a man can drink perfectly well out of the hollow of his hand.

Water drawn from the pump washed down this primitively simple meal, and my two friends were so constituted that they experienced a certain satisfaction in reducing themselves to the barest necessaries of life. The fewer one's needs, the easier it is to escape from the trammels of civilisation; in their cellar, they felt as free as if they had been on a desert island. On a shutter placed upon trestles were laid out the drawings and working-plans of the job, a package of cigarette paper almost used up, with its engraving of smug- glers and its Catalonian motto: Upa^ mynions, alere! a tobacco-pouch made out of the webbed foot of some sea-bird, and whence escaped, as golden hairs out of a net, a few bits of Maryland tobacco, too few, alas ! to furnish material for a last cigarette.

At that time I had not yet taken to smoking, but I was already aware that there is no greater privation for men in the habit of gargling themselves with tobacco, than the lack of the weed. I had therefore brought a package of Maryland in the hope that my friends' pride would not take offence at so insignificant an of- fering. They were just the sort of fellows who, with

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empty stomachs, always reply, when invited to share a meal, that they have just risen from table after indulg- ing in a splendid dinner. They had had no smoke since the night before, however, and Petrus, opening the package, drew out some of the tobacco, rolled it under his thumb, the colour of burnished gold, in the small leaf of papel de kilo, lighted it at the candle stuck in the neck of an empty bottle, and put it to his lips with an unmistakable expression of enjoyment such as rarely showed on his stoical countenance. His great eyes, half Spanish, half Arab, flashed for an instant, a faint blush coloured his olive skin, jets of smoke shot out alternately from his nostrils and his lips, and ere long he disappeared within the encircling cloud, like Jupiter, the cloud-compeller. Needless to say that meanwhile Jules Vabre, the miraculous comrade, was engaged in doing precisely the same thing.

Now my reader may well inquire by what tenuous thread the worthy Jules Vabre is connected with the history of Romanticism, since, though he was a charm- ing fellow, he has but the slightest claim to literary fame, not having, as I myself have owned, finished, or, indeed, even begun the " Essay on the Incommo-

THE MIRACULOUS COMRADE

diousness of Commodes," designed to be a work of transcendental cabinet-making.

Well, Jules Vabre loved Shakespeare, loved him with a love that was excessive, even in a Romanticist caenaculum. Shakespeare was his god, his idol, his master passion, a phenomenon he could never quite familiarise himself with, and which filled him with ever renewed surprise. He thought of him by day, and dreamed of him by night, and like La Fontaine, who used to ask passers-by, cc Have you read Baruch ? " Vabre would not have hesitated to stop a man in the street to inquire whether he had read Shakespeare. The architect was wholly engrossed in and possessed by the poet. Finding that he did not know English well enough, Jules Vabre, undismayed by the prospect of hunger and want, left Paris for London, his sole object being to acquaint himself so thoroughly with his author's tongue that no fine shade of meaning should escape him. In his opinion, and he may have been right, in order to learn a foreign tongue thoroughly, it was first and foremost necessary to steep one's self in the atmosphere of the country, to give up one's ideas, to cease criticising, to yield implicitly to the local influ- ences, to imitate the gestures, the manners, the appear-

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ance of the natives as far as possible, to eat as they did, to drink the same drinks, the system is plain.

Among other paradoxes he upheld that Latin tongues ought to be washed down with wine, and Anglo-Saxon with beer, and he maintained that for his part it was to stout and double stout that he owed his amazing prog- ress ; that drink, so essentially English, having enabled him to become intimate with the country, having suggested to him ideas unknown to the French, having given him new sensations, and revealed to him shades of interpretation hidden from every one else.

He had acquired an English soul, an English brain, an English exterior; he thought in English only, and never read French newspapers or books. Letters from his former home remained unopened on his table, for be would not allow anything to distract him in his preparation for his travels into the unknown lands of Shakespeare.

Such was his state of mind when, a number of years later, I came upon him it was in 1843 or ^44 in a tavern on High Holborn, where he had installed himself both for the sake of economy and in order to

dine in a thorough English centre among good people

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stuffed full of roast beef and ale, wholly devoid of ideas, and pretty nearly such as must have been the usual spectators at the "Globe," in front of which William Shakespeare had held horses in his youth,

His own appearance was altered. His fair mus- tache had fallen under the steel of a Sheffield razor, and he was as clean shaven as any of the fastidious bourgeois he made so much fun of formerly. The metamorphosis was complete, and I had before me a perfect British subject.

When he caught sight of me, his gray eyes sparkled, he shook my hand so energetically that had not my arm been solidly fastened to my shoulder, it would have remained in his grasp, and he began to talk to me with so pronounced an English accent that I could scarcely make out what he said.

" Well, my dear Vabre," said I, " if you still mean to translate Shakespeare, all you have to do now is to learn French."

"I shall set about it at once," replied he, struck more by the remark than by the joke it contained.

The miraculous comrade had long dreamt of a liter- ary monument more enduring than brass, and wished to present the Romanticist school with a treasure it

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still lacked, namely, a translation of Shakespeare ab- solutely true to the text, to the thought, and to the expression, reproducing the turn, the flow, and the movement of the sentences, bringing out the mingling of blank verse, rimed verse, and prose, fearlessly render- ing euphuistic subtleties and coarse remarks alike, and reproducing the inward meaning of the English to an extent hitherto unapproached by any one* In a word, though poor, unknown, without means, at the cost of the bitterest hardships borne in silence, for he was one of those men to whom starvation seems quite natural he was preparing to carry out this gigantic work for which, since 1830, he had been making ready by persevering and conscientious study.

Vabre translated aloud to me, book in hand, pas- sages from " Hamlet," " Othello," and " King Lear," with a local savour, an accuracy of expression, and a penetration of the meaning which made them sound wholly new to me. I also heard him explain with a view to composing a ballet to Carlotta Grisi, who was then dancing in London, " The Tempest " and " A Midsummer Night's Dream " in the most poetic and ingenious fashion. If the proposed ballets had

been written, the parts of Miranda and Titania would

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have been thoroughly understood by their lovely in- terpreter.

Long before Taine, as is proved by his paradox on the true way to learn English, Jules Vabre had in- vented or guessed at the theory of milieux, exactly as he had determined the true laws governing the trans- lation of Shakespeare.

A few years ago there called upon me in my little hermitage in the Rue de Longchamps, a pale-faced gentleman, with very white hair, dressed in black and looking like a clergyman. It was Jules Vabre, who had not yet found a publisher for his translation, and who had returned to France in order to found an Inter- national School I must beg to be forgiven for using this expression, for it did not then sound as badly as it does nowadays. He wanted to explain " Hernani " to the English, and " Macbeth " to the French. It an- noyed him to see the English learning French out of "The Adventures of Telemachus," and the French studying English in the pages of the "Vicar of Wakefield."

Whether his venture proved successful or not, I do not know, for I never saw him after that call, though he promised to come again. I incline, however, to the

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belief that the educational establishment was not more successful than the translation. Jules Vabre was born under an unlucky star, and treacherous fate, under the guise of ill luck, constantly pursued him. Is he dead, or is he alive ? I know not, but if he is no more and there is a tombstone over his remains somewhere or other, there should be inscribed upon it, for sole epitaph :

HE LOVED SHAKESPEARE,

just as on Thomas Hood's tombstone was cut :

HE WROTE THE SONG OF THE SHIRT. His whole life is contained in those words.

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V GRAZIANO

VERY often, while making the long trip from Neuilly to Paris, sedately perched on top of the bus, where one at least enjoys liberty to smoke a cigar and even a pipe, I used involuntarily to glance, shortly before reaching the great Place de 1'Arc de 1'Etoile, at a small, low house on the Avenue de la Grande-Armee, having a ground-floor only, half hidden in and breaking in upon the line of tall and handsome houses built since the days, already pretty distant, when the little building had been erected,

The tavern for such it is is in no respect interesting or picturesque in itself. It is smeared thickly over with a staring red, of a shade between that of blood and that of wine, recalling the neo-rosso antico of King Ludwig of Bavaria. The wonder is that the mean and wretched hovel has not long since been swept off the land, which has risen so greatly in value ; it may be due to one of those instances of

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ignorant and obstinate avarice not uncommon among small proprietors.

My glance never falls upon that red splash in the line of white houses, which reminds me of the splash of blood upon the white marble steps of the Alhambra in Regnault's painting, without awakening tender feelings in me and summoning back innumerable remembrances of my youth that call up an indulgent smile on my face saddened by maturity, for I am not certain that I am any more sensible now than I was in my salad days.

If the worthy bourgeois, easily known by his tri- angular shirt-collar, his gold-rimmed spectacles and his watch charms, by whose side I am sitting on top of the bus, had the least suspicion of the larks I indulged in within that place, he would withdraw in horror to the very end of the seat, and most probably request the conductor to stop the vehicle and allow him to alight, Pandore would submit such an interesting case to his police sergeant, and the latter would reply, with his customary wisdom, that the Statute of Limitations applies in this instance.

It was in 183-, at which time the Champs-EIysces had not the splendid and brilliant appearance they now present. Then solitude and shadow held possession

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of the great waste spaces, and foul or sinister fig- ures sneaked about under the trees where the light of the street-lamps did not reach. A few disrepu- table cafes stood in the centre of the square plots, the trees of which had long retained the marks of the teeth of the Ukraine horses. Small indeed was the number of houses that bordered the roadway, for there had not been any general migration in that direction.

The two domed lodges of the Barriere de 1'Etoile, with their pillars, the courses of which were alternately of square and of round stones, still stood, and looked rather well in the perspective. The enclosing wall had not been pulled down, and the fortifications were not spoken of any more than was the Great Wall of China, The high-road to Neuiily, running to Courbe- voie, was lined by trees more than by houses, and traversed waste fields or passed between boardings that rose on the lower sides of the road itself. On those dusty steppes shone, like a poppy on the edge of a suburban cornfield ravaged by the Sunday trippers of both sexes, the single tavern that then bore the name of the Petit Moulin Rouge, not to be confounded with the Grand Moulin Rouge in the. Alice des Veuves,

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from which it differed in respect of the installation, the food, and especially the company. None of the vari- ously named lights o' love were to be met with there, not a single chorus girl or supernumerary in the ballet, not even any shop-girls. The army of mercenaries had not yet started upon its campaign ; and besides, as Gerard de Nerval used to say, there were still love affairs in those days. It was worth hearing him say this in a tone of gallantry, purposely old-fashioned and recalling the refined ways of the good old times. It was a poem. Every man had in his own corner his Laura or his Beatrix to whom he dedicated his verse.

The installation of the Petit Moulin Rouge was of the simplest. A whitewashed room, the floor dusted over with yellow sand, a counter tinned over and laden with pewters and drinking measures, a sideboard fur- nished with the glazed, brightly coloured earthenware adorned with cocks, bouquets of cornflowers and poppies that is to be met with nowadays only in the poorest of country Inns, tables and benches of wooden boards drawn from boats, formed the architecture, the furnishing, and the plenishing of the place. As for the silverware, it consisted simply of common iron

GRAZIANO

stuff, for Viscount Ruolz had not then discovered the way to plate German silver, and the mediaeval coffer had not been reintroduced. The glassware did not come from Baccarat's, but it was of that thin, sparkling, ribbed glass in which the wine smiled in the bowl, as the refrain of the old drinking-songs hath it.

Behind the common room there was a room reserved for club dinners, and a private room, devoted to the better class of customers, which opened on to a small garden lying on a fairly steep slope, and in which were arbours and shrubberies where wine and beer were served, and even, to the more fastidious, Seltzer water and sparkling lemonade.

Through a half-opened door one could look into the kitchen, with its stew-pans like unto bucklers of old. In front of the range a man of high stature and senatorial port, wearing a white jacket, appeared to be sunk in thought, as if suffering from nostalgia. His nose was huge, but perfectly handsome and correct, of the sort that by its very dimensions seems to be a cari- cature of beauty. By this majestic nose and the fringe of black beard that framed in his pale face, long as a theatrical mask, he was easily recognised as a child

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of Graecia Magna, a thorough-bred and genuine Neapolitan.

The painters forthwith began to prowl round him, forgetting that they had come in to drink a pewter or two of beer, and were fetching their sketch-books out of their pockets in order to turn to account that superb model whom they would willingly have travelled as far as the Strada di Piedigrotta or the Strada di Mergellina to see, and whom, by extraordinary good luck, they came upon in the suburbs, in Neuilly, in front of the kitchener of a tavern that in no wise resembled a Nea- politan osteria. He good-naturedly accepted the ad- miration of the artists as a man accustomed to it ; he assumed the pose indicated and knew how to stand, a rare thing indeed. He would have made an excellent model, but, like the Italian cook in Balzac's tale, " Gambara," he was devoted to his art ; and his self- love, amusing to Northerners, was fully justified. He cooked for us macaroni au sughillo, with tomatoes that made us lick our chops, sublime macaroni that he alone could duplicate.

Our first caenaculum had had Mother Suguet; our second owned Graziano, and very proud indeed were we of our Neapolitan, who cooked for poor Italian

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workmen, delighted at finding in the suburban tavern the pastes and cheese of their native land. Not only did we put local colour into our sketches and paintings, we had it in our food. What more could the heart of man desire, and how very far ahead of Mother Suguet's stewed rabbits was Graziano's macaroni ! Graziano, a name worthy of figuring among those of the Princess Negroni's guests.

He initiated us in succession into the delights of stufato, tagliarini, gnocehi. A golden rain of Par- mesan seemed to fall upon our plates from heaven, as Jupiter fell in golden rain into Danae's lap. These mad orgies, that caused me at the time to look uneasily at the wall, lest I should see there a handwriting in letters of fire, were pompously watered with cheap wines of Suresnes and Argenteuil, bearing the names of the most renowned brands. On the other hand, we were crowned with roses, and it might have been thought that, like the cardinals dining in the Papal vineyard, each guest had his coffin in the cloak-room.

These diversions, seasoned though they were with jokes, witticisms, puns, paradoxes, strange cries, and a dialogue recalling now that of Pluto's Banquet and

A HISTORY OF ROMANTICISM

now that in Beroalde de Verville's " Way to Succeed," soon began to pall upon us and to strike us as being commonplace and lacking in the picturesque and the unexpected. For, in point of fact, there was nothing very Titanic in eating macaroni in a tavern, and the thunderbolts of heaven were not fetched from the celestial arsenal on that account. To give our entertainments a touch of piquancy and to warm them up properly, something risky, auda- cious, revolting, Byronic, Satanic, in a word, was needed.

We were all admirers of the young Lord Byron's pranks and nocturnal bacchanalian revels in Newstcad Abbey, with his young friends in monks' gowns, the folds of which, as they opened, occasionally revealed fair feminine forms j those banquets in which was handed round, full of dark wine, a cup whiter than ivory, that rosy lips touched with a slight tremor, seemed to us the highest embodiment of dandyism, thanks to the absolute indifference exhibited in them to what terrifies man in general. It is true that we did not possess Newstead Abbey, with its long, shadowy cloisters, its swans gliding about on the silvery waters in the light of the moon, nor the lovely young sinners,

GRAZIANO

fair, dark, or red-haired, but we could certainly secure a skull, and Gerard de Nerval undertook to do so, his father, a retired army surgeon, having quite a fine anatomical collection.

The skull itself was that of a drum-major, killed at the battle of the Moskowa, and not that of a girl who had died of consumption, so Gerard told us. He further informed us that he had mounted it as a cup by means of a drawer handle fastened by a nut and screw-bolt. The skull was filled with wine, and handed round, each man putting it to his lips with more or less well- concealed repugnance.

" Waiter," cried one of the neophytes, endowed with excessive zeal, "fetch us brine from the ocean ! "

" What for, my boy ? " asked Jules Vabre.

" Is it not told of Han d'Islande that c he drank the briny waters in the skulls of the dead ' ? Well, I mean to do as he did, and to drink his health. Noth- ing can be more Romanticist ! "

Or more absurd, and I have been unable to resist making fun of it in the " Jeunes-F ranee/'

So it was in that little red house, O worthy Joseph Prudhomme, respectable pupil of Brard and Saint-

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Omer, sworn court expert, that I, your peaceful companion on the top of the bus, used to drink out of a skull like a regular cannibal, through sheer bravado, and weariness and disgust of your solemn stupidity.

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CELESTIN NANTEUIL

IN the " Jeunes-France " there is a short tale writ- ten, if I remember right, to accompany in a Keepsake, or a landscape, rather, a wonderful English engraving representing Saint Sebald's Square in Niirnberg. At that time it was customary to ask of writers who had not yet got over the delight of see- ing themselves in print, a few lines of prose or verse to serve as a text for the splendid illustrations by Robinson, Cousin, Finden, Westall, Roberts, and Prout. I had contributed in my turn, and my performance bore the title, " Elias Wildmanstadius, or the Med- iaeval Man." He was, so to speak, the genius of that Gothic city, one of those belated beings who have missed coming into the world at the right time, and whom the angel charged with liberating souls does not release quickly enough. Elias ought to have been born in 1460. At that time he would have lived among his contemporaries j no one would have thought

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him eccentric and he would have found everybody charming. Even nowadays is not Henry Leys, the Belgian painter, a striking example of a man come too late into the world? Is not his place set apart for him in the group that comprises Lucas von Leyden, Cranach, Wohlgemuth, Schoreel, and Albert Durcr? There is nothing modern about him, and it would be a grievous mistake to suppose that he is merely an imitator, a copyist of the Gothic painters. It is a case of transportation of times, of a soul born out of sea- son, of anachronism; nothing more. These inex- plicable reappearances of ancient motives cause lively surprise, and gain for such artists a reputation for originality. A man belonging to a vanished period reappears, after a long interval, with beliefs, prejudices, and tastes forgotten for more than a century, and recalling a remote civilisation.

Elias Wildmanstadius was the symbol of these re- vivals of the past, but he was by no means a creation of my fancy. He was suggested to me by one of my friends in the lesser caenaculum, Celcstin Nanteuil, who might have been named u The Mediaeval Youth."

He looked like one of the tall thurifer angels or players on the sackbut that dwell on the gables of

CELESTIN NANTEUIL

cathedrals, that had come down into the city amid the busy citizens, still wearing his nimbus stuck on his head by way of a hat, and wholly unconscious of the fact that it is not customary to wear an aureole on the street. In 1830 he was about eighteen or nineteen years of age ; tall, slight, slender as a fluted pillar in a fifteenth-century nave, his curling hair not unlike the acanthus of the capitals. His spiritualistic figure seemed to lengthen out and to aspire towards heaven with in- creased ardour ; his complexion was rosy and white ; the azure of the Fiesole frescoes had furnished the blue for his eyes, and his aureole-gold hair seemed to have been painted with gold, hair by hair, by one of the miniaturists of the Middle Ages.

The line in Barbier's cc Pianto," which so admirably describes Raphael,

A long haired, oval face on slender neck poised,"

had not then been written, but once it was, it was constantly applied to Celestin Nanteuil. His angelic face betrayed none of the preoccupations of the age. It seemed as though, from the height of his Gothic pinnacle, he overlooked the modern city, soaring over the sea of roofs, watching the swirl of the blue smoke, the squares that looked like chess-boards, the streets

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that appeared like saw-cuts in blocks of stone, and the passers-by no bigger than ants, but all faintly through the shadowing vapours, while from his aerial observa- tory, as from a stage-box, he beheld in all their details the rose windows, the belfries bristling with crockets, the kings, the patriarchs, the prophets, the saints, the various orders of angels, the whole of the monstrous host of demons and chimeras, with their talons, their scales, their teeth, their hideous wings j the serpents, the tarasques, the gargoyles, the asses' heads, the monkeys' faces, the whole of the strange bestiary of the Middle Ages.

Being fair as fair could be, his nascent beard showed only as silky white down upon his cheeks, like peach* bloom seen only in reflected light, and he had the characteristics of the undecided sex of supernatural beings, half youth, half girl. He was easily moved and easily startled, and blushed easily. His long blue frock- coat, buttoned across his chest and cut something after the fashion of a ca; sock, set off the somewhat awk- ward, but not inelegant grace oKthe shy young artist who must have been like the German neo-Christian painters, the pupils of Overbeck, who maintained in Rome the doctrine of primitive Catholic art.

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It must not be supposed, however, that Celestin Nanteuil strove after the thin, emaciated style, simpli- fied into nothingness, which Overbeck appears to con- sider the acme of religious art. He did not, through desire for mortification, restrict himself to gray, violet, or neutral tints. He did not believe that colour was wicked sensuality and a deceitful mirage. He was a thorough Romanticist, who loved the picturesque and colour, and who possessed in a marked degree the feel- ing for what was then called, for want of a better term, the Mediaeval, though what was meant was perfectly clear, and comprised what was neither Greek nor Roman, but belonged to the period between the twelfth and the sixteenth centuries.

In his first attempts, Celestin Nanteuil drew and painted after the manner of an artist in stained glass. In order to obtain more intense tones, he made use of glass stained in fusion. Of these first attempts may be said, what one of Joseph Delorme's friends said of certain of the shorter ballads of Victor Hugo, such as "The Burgrave's Hunt," and "King John's Joust," that they were Gothic stained-glass windows. In these the breaking in of the rhythm is constantly visible as 5s the breaking in of the lead in the painting,

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and it is impossible that it should be otherwise. In such short fanciful pieces the important thing is to attain the swing, the turn, the clerical, monkish, regal, lordly set of the figures and the brilliant colouring. It could not be better done, and the publication of the poet's ballads may help one to understand the artist's water-colours.

With wonderful facility of assimilation, Celestrn had acquired the angular anatomy of armour, the extrava- gant cut of lambrequins, the fanciful or monstrous figures of blazonry, the flowered patterns of the blaz- oned skirts, the haughty port of the feudal barons, the modest air of the ladies of the manors, the hypocritical mien of the stout Carmelite friars, the sly glance of the youthful pages in particoloured hose, and in his back- grounds he cut the sky line with buildings bristling with towers, belfries, and cathedral spires that crouched amid their flying buttresses like black spiders squatting between their legs.

He was also particularly successful in setting the characters of a novel, a poem, or a drama in ornaments recalling Gothic reliquaries with triple pillars, ogee arches, canopied and bracketed niches, statuettes, fig- ures, chimerical or symbolical animals, saints of either , _

CELESTIN NANTEUIL

sex upon a golden background which he invented as he wrought, for he had an inexhaustible fancy. He worked equally well with brush, pen, pencil, or knife. I have myself seen him, when trying to render the grain of an old wall, place a piece of tulle on the paper and dab umber through the meshes of the stuff. In this way he managed to get a coarser grain on his stonework than the roughest that Decamps painted. He could so thoroughly enter at will into the spirit or rather the feeling of old Gothic imagery that he turned out figures of Our Lady del Pilar in brocaded dalmatics, Mothers of Sorrows with the seven swords in their bosoms, and Saint Christophers bearing the Child Jesus on their shoulders as they leaned upon a palm tree, that were worthy of serving as models to the Byzan- tines of Epinal.

It was not through great research or severe study that he attained this talent, but through a similarity of temperament with that of the mediaeval artists. He felt intuitively what he had never seen, and he could have sworn he had wandered about the tower- girt cities, and the walls with their look-outs, defended by donjons, and topped by churches with traceried spires in which he set foot for the first time. Like

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Elias Wildmanstadius, he had missed his right time for coming into the world, but, more fortunate than he, he had managed, with the help of art, to create for himself surroundings that suited him, and to find contemporaries in the Romanticist school.

u Notre-Dame de Paris " was the object of his most fervent admiration, I need not say, and he drew from it suggestions for endless drawings and water-colours al- together novel and remarkable. Nothing less resembled the cheap, sentimental Romanticism that flourished about the year 1825. One of the greatest services the Ro- manticist school rendered to art was ridding it of this spurious stuff, and Celestin Nanteuil may well claim a large share of the honour. With an ingenuous, almost childish air, he was possessed of the finest and the best wit, and poets loved to take him for a confidant. He was one of the favourites of the Master, who enjoyed his company, and occasionally carried him off on his short excursions. He had fought heroically in every one of the great battles of Romanticism, but he indulged in no illusions as to the outcome. He felt the growing animosity on the one hand, and, on the other, failing enthusiasm, and mediocrity delighted at having its

revenge against genius.

CELESTIN NANTEUIL

The success of " Lucrece " was praised extrava- gantly in order to make more striking the failure of Victor Hugo's next drama, that was soon to be pro- duced. Troubled about the fate of the "Burgraves," Vacquerie and Meurice went to Celestin Nanteuil and asked him for three or four hundred Spartans ready to do or die rather than allow the barbarian host to cross the Thcrmopylse. Nanteuil shook his long, curled and ringleted hair with an air of profoundest melancholy, and with a sigh replied to Vacquerie, who had been the spokesman : u Young man, go and tell your master that there are no more youth. I cannot find the three hundred young men,"

Many years had elapsed since the splendid nights of a Hernani," when the whole of youth seemed to be rushing unanimously towards the future, intoxicated with enthusiasm and poetry, and expecting to gather for itself the palms it was fighting to secure for an- other. The Master's talent had gone on growing ; his genius had developed and assumed Titanic propor- tions ; he had attained to sublimity in the JEschylus- like trilogy of " Job the Accursed/' that Prometheus of the Rhine, whose Caucasus was the Taurus, and whose Jupiter was Frederic Barbarossa.

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It was a piece of refinement, in those days, for

Romanticist editions to be adorned with a vignette, a

frontispiece, or an etching by Celestin Nanteuil. The existence of the illustration now greatly increases the value of a copy of a book, and bibliophiles eagerly seek out the volumes that contain them. Celestin's compositions were set in a number of small frames round the main subject, and contained incidents drawn from the tale or poem. They are artistic etchings dashed off without the minute precautions of profes- sionals. One of the rarest of these vignettes is the frontispiece to u Albertus, or The Soul and Sm," which recalls the mysterious drawings and the strange fantastic effects Rembrandt loves. Alphonse Royer's "Vcnezia la bella " is illustrated with a view of the Pia///,a San Marco, taken from the sea, with the regulation gon- dola and murdered girl

It is impossible to reckon the number of cuts, draw- ings, compositions, woodcuts for illustrated works, lithographs, and head-pieces for songs turned out by Celestin NanteuiL A terrible waste of talent, but, on the other hand, inexhaustible wealth of fancy. Is it not using one's talent generously to meet all wants, to satisfy all fancies, to suit the ever changing fashions of

CELESTIN NANTEUIL

the day, and to be withal a delightful painter, a clever and delicate colourist who only lacked time in which to paint, as we poets only lack time in which to write verse ? It is true that people do not think as highly of you as of a learned ass who spends ten years in producing a single daub.

Although compelled by the necessities of life to mingle somewhat with the Philistines, to emerge from the old Gothic city where the streets still show pepper- pot turrets at the corners, and to walk along the broad pavements of Haussmann's rectilineal perspectives, he still loves houses with projecting stories, with pointed or dentelated gables, with painted and carved beams, with diamond-paned windows set in lead, and old fur- niture of shining oak. Like Elias Wildmanstadius, he keeps on dreaming of the past in Dijon, where he is the director of the Art School, and where he can study at his leisure the wondrous spire, the cathedral, and the donjon of the old Ducal Palace, the while repeating with Gaspard de la Nuit ;

" A Gothic donjon Like Gothic spire In a scenic sky, Below is Dijon.

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Its laughing vines

Have compeers none 5

Its spires of yore

Were half a score.

There many a stoup

Is painted or carved 5

And many a portal

Fan-like stands open.

Long may'st thou live, Dijon !

While my flat nose

Sings of thy mustard

And thy bell-striker."

Dijon has been very hospitable to Romanticist painters. Louis Boulanger, the painter of u Maaeppa," " The Witches' Sabbath," " The Massacre of Saint Bartholomew," the friend of Victor Hugo, whose name figures in " Lcs Oricntales," the u Autumn Leaves," and "Sunbeams and Shadows,'* is dying there in the shadow of the school he directed, and Celestin Nan- teuil is turning his leisure to account to work.

A HISTORY OF ROMANTICISM

VII

OTHER MEDALLIONS PHILOTHEE O'NEDDY

VERY few people now remember Philothee O'Neddy, whose pseudonym is but the ana- gram of his name. I shall not reveal the latter ; the poet having thought^fit to conceal his face, I shall not undo the cords of his mask.

Philothee O'Neddy enjoyed a brief notoriety about the year 1838* He surprised people j as painters put it, he fired a pistol in the cellar and the flash was noticed. But he did not take advantage of the atten- tion he had excited j after having stood the fire of the re- doubt, his hand upon the enemy's flagstaff, he remained for a moment standing amid the smoke of battle, and then quietly went down to the bottom of the conquered wall, careless of his success. Little by little he allowed himself to be forgotten, and the path that led to his literary threshold soon disappeared under brambles, moss, and parasitical vegetation. A secret grief more

_ _ -

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or less manfully borne, the profound fatigue that in the case of some young poets follows upon a too violent intellectual effort, the discord between the ideal and the reality, perhaps also regret for certain pieces of audacity, had strewn their gray ashes over the author of u Fire and Flame." He had withdrawn from the lesser caenaculum where he had been wont to discourse and to blaze, and all trace of him had been lost, as is too often the case in the days of dispersion, when fall the dream-Babels raised by companions in beliefs at the happy age of twenty.

In respect of his years, he was my contemporary, that is, he had attained his majority after 1830, In the Romanticist school, we were all precocious and might every one of us have inscribed upon our first volume of verse : " Poems of a Minor,*' like Lord Byron.

At the time that Philothec O'Neddy frequented Pctrus' cellar and Jehan's place the young sculptor had set up his studio in a fruit shop at the corner of the Rue Vaugirard he was a young fellow whose peculiarity was that he had the complexion of a mulatto, and thick, fair, wavy hair like a Scandinavian. His eyes were light blue, and his short sight made them

OTHER MEDALLIONS

project; his lips were heavy, red, and sensual \ his general appearance was African, and had won for him the appellation of Othello.

Who his Desdemona might be, no one knew, and it was absolutely certain that he had no lago, for our whole company loved him. He never left off his eye- glasses ; he slept with them on, for without them, he used to say, he could not make out his dreams clearly and thus lost the enchantments of night; the poetic spells of the sylphs, the alluring charms of the grace- ful vampires that haunt the dreams of youth, were lost in a faint mist.

One and the same characteristic is common to all the early works of that period : overflowing lyricism and striving after passion. The main points of the pro- gramme which every man endeavoured to carry out to the best of his ability, the ideals and the secret desires of the Romanticist youth, were to freely develop every caprice of thought, even if it offended taste, conven- tionality, and rule ; to hate and repel to the utmost of one's power the profane vulgar, as Horace called it, the grocers, Philistines, or bourgeois, as the mustachioed and long-haired young painter students named them ; to celebrate love in terms that might set fire to the

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paper on which one wrote 5 to set it up as the sole end and sole means of happiness, and to sanctify and deify Art, which was to be upheld as a second Creator.

No one more than Philothee O'Neddy exhibited these characteristics of extravagance and tension. The expression u paroxyst," first employed by Nestor Roqueplan, seemed to have been invented specially for Philothee. In all he did the tone was excessive, the colouring exaggerated and violent, the utmost bounds of expression reached, the very originality aggressive, and the whole almost dripping with incredibility, as Xavier Aubryet used to say. Nevertheless, the feeling for the poetic period and the harmony of rhythm made itself felt through the absurd paradoxes, the sophistical maxims, the incoherent metaphors, the turgid hyper- bolae and the six-foot words.

Philothee was a metrical writer; he knew how to fashion a line on the anvil, and when he had drawn from the fire the incandescent Alexandrine, he could give it, amid a shower of sparks, the form he wished by means of his heavy and persevering hammering. Had he not retired so early, he would unquestionably have made a name for himself in the sacred battalion. He

OTHER MEDALLIONS

possessed force, a quality seldom met with in artists, but at the very outset he lost courage through a weari- ness the secret of which remains hidden in the breast, and even more frequently, in the heart of the poet. To attain the end he sought, he would have had to work much harder.

- Enthusiasm and study, love and poesy, In your vast am-

brosial sea Our souls of fire in ecstasy Should lose themselves ! In you, endowed with wondrous genius, Giving birth to purest happiness, I should be an artist greater than God him- self !"

I once owned a copy of cc Fire and Flame " with an autograph dedication by the authors but I have it not now. Have you ever noticed that curious books, that have become rare, have legs, like the little boats con- cerning which the child consulted his father ? They plainly have, else they would not scuttle about, but would remain quietly on the shelf in the library where they have been carefully placed between two well- bound volumes of high morality. When the selections drawn from one of Charles Asselineau's small Roman- ticist collection fall into my hands, I am filled with bitterest regrets. Every one of these books now so rare, so hard to find, so precious, that fetch such high

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prices at auction, I could have had for nothing, with the etching, the woodcut, the portrait, the ornamental letter, or whatever constitutes the bibliophile's delight in his innocent pursuit and inspires him with such sweet emotions. I could have owned those princeps editions, the authoritative ones, revised by the authors themselves. They would have come one after another to take their place behind the glass of my shelves; locked up, however, now, since there are honest people who steal books. Unfortunately it is too late ; most of my friends arc dead, the editions have long been out of print, and here I am writing " A History of Roman- ticism," a movement in which I have* played a small part, without possessing a single one of these books, though every one bore, as a safeguard, the master's sacred name.

Some five or six years ago, though it seems an age, so many things have happened since, Cclcstin Nanteuil was appointed Director of the Art School at Dijon, as I stated when speaking of him. This ap- pointment secured for the brave and courageous artist, worn out by a life too well filled with labour, or drudgery rather, a chance to enjoy leisure in which real painting might find room; so there was no reason why we

OTHER MEDALLIONS

should be sad, and yet we all were, it was Nanteuil's hoc erat in votis^ and we resolved to celebrate his honours by giving him a dinner.

The old bands of "Hernani" and " Lucrezia Borgia," every one who had fought the Classicist hydra with its hundred bewigged heads, either on the stage or at meetings of hanging committees, the few that had been faithful to the " Roi s'amuse," and the " Burgraves," the old studio chums, and the young pupils also, nay, even some who were believed to be lost to art and to have passed over to the ranks of the Philistines, assembled from all parts of the land and met in a restaurant at the corner of the Rue du Sentier. When every one had arrived and the roll had been called, one of us who knew u Hernani" well, having fought at thirty-two pitched performances, declaimed the fol- lowing lines :

" Call not for their powerless swords : For every man you summon, sixty attend me. Sixty ! every one worth the four of you ! So, let us settle our quarrel here together. 1 "

It was long since such a Romanticist agape had been held. One would have had to go back to the days when, for lack of the salt sea wave, we drank cheap

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wine at the Moulin Rouge in the skulls of the dead ; but many a year had elapsed since then. Snow had fallen upon the mountain tops ; pepper and salt had mingled in our beards ; noses had become red, the smooth cheeks of yore had wrinkles, and in some of the guests, whom I had not met for a long time, I could perceive the shadow of their youth. I looked somewhat anxiously at my fellow-guests, and I said to myself: "Do I produce the same effect upon them? Do I seem as ugly to them, as old, as morose as they appear to me ? Is this, then, all that is left of the bril- liant band of c Hcrnani * that so cleverly took the bull by the horns and worried the public ? How desperately weary of life they look, and how little eager to leap the barriers ! "

So the dinner began sadly, as do all entertainments. These valiant fellows, once so fierce, would not even have torn in pieces a member of the Academy or of the Institute. At last the ice was broken; the wine stirred up the hearts; the memories of the old days came back, sweet and charming; we talked of the happy times of poverty when we fed on glory and love* Was there ever better fare ? We mingled in our talks then, like devotees of the same god, lines known by

OTHER MEDALLIONS

every one, like the responses of a litany. We were young, handsome, proud, full of enthusiasm.

In a corner, between two of NanteuiPs comrades, I saw, towards the end of dinner, when men were beginning to leave their seats to go and talk with a friend at the other end of the table, a man whose appearance was familiar to me. It was Philothee O 'Neddy, who had emerged from the catacombs of the mysterious life into which he had disappeared, in order to come and drink a stirrup cup with his friend Celestin Nanteuil on his way to Dijon, instead of to San Jago di Compostello, as he had intended. His hair was still wavy, but sprinkled with silver, and the mark made by his eye-glasses upon his nose had be- come so deep with time that the glasses stuck in it of themselves.

cc Well," said I, going up to him and shaking his hand, " when will your second volume of verse appear? "

He gazed at me with his watery, frightened blue eyes, and answered with a sigh:

ct When there are no more bourgeois."

A HISTORY OF ROMANTICISM

VIII GERARD DE NERVAL

I HAVE not yet spoken of Gerard, good old Gerard, as we used to call him in our little com- pany, and never did man better deserve the title. Kindness streamed from him as light from a luminous body ; it was always visible and formed a special at- mosphere round him. It really seemed as if it were placing Gerard under an obligation to ask him a fa- vour ; he thanked you for having thought of him, and at once started off, going from the Arc de FEtoile to the Bastille, or from the Pantheon to the Batignolles, in order to offer to some newspaper editor a penniless friend's article, or to find out the reason why the ac- cepted article had not long since been published. He walked with a step as light as an ostrich's, borne off the ground at every step, and which an Arab horse finds it difficult to keep up with. He was not a sedentary man; if he was shut up between four walls, with a desk in front of him, his inspiration vanished and his

GERARD DE NERVAL

thought died. He was an ambulatory writer, like Jean- Jacques Rousseau and Restif de la Bretonne, and he wasted no time on his trips, every one of which had for object the doing of a service to a comrade or a friend.

He worked as he walked, and from time to time stopped short and hunted in his capacious pockets for a note-book, made of a few sheets sewn together, on which he wrote down a thought, a sentence, a word, a reminiscence, a sign understood of himself alone, then shut the book up and started off again as fast as before. That was the way in which he composed. More than once I have heard him wish that he could travel through life along an endless band of paper that should roll itself up behind him, and upon which he would note the thoughts that occurred to him, so that at the end of his road they would form a single volume with a single line. His mind was like an apo- dal swallow 5 he was all wings and had no feet, or at most a scarcely perceptible claw by which he could hang on for a moment while taking breath. He came and went, made abrupt zigzags with unexpected turns, ascended, descended, rose again, soared and moved in the atmosphere with the joyous freedom of a being

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in its own element. It was not restless mobility, frivo- lous lightsomeness, fantastic hopping about, but natural agility and the power to float and rise.

At times he might be seen at a street corner, hat in hand, in a sort of ecstasy, plainly away from the place where stood his body, his eyes shining like blue stars, his light, fair hair, already somewhat thin, forming a sort of golden mist upon his porcelain brow, the most perfectly shaped cup that ever held a human brain, as he climbed the spiral stairs of some mental tower of BabcK When I canic upon him thus occupied, I was always careful not to accost him abruptly, lest I should cause him to fall from the heights of his reverie like a somnambulist suddenly awakened as he walks with closed eyes upon the edge of a roof, I used to stand in the line of his ga/<c, giving him time to return from the depths of his dream, and waiting until his eye should full upon me of itself, when, apparently at least, he quickly enough returned to the reality of life with a friendly or a witty remark.

The Gerard of these early years was not very like the Gerard whom most writers of to-day have met at Le Peletier's Divan, Then the future smiled upon

GERARD DE NERVAL

him, and he knew no other misfortune than the re- fusals of theatrical managers, who declined to put on the plays of an unknown youth, though they received them with hypocritical welcome, and drew down upon themselves in consequence, in the preface to Petrus BorePs " Rhapsodies," the following sharp repri- mand :

" Here is to you, good old Gerard ! When will the managers, the excisemen of literature, allow your works, so handsomely welcomed by their private com- mittees, to reach the committee of the public?"

At that time he had not met the snail carrying its lump of earth on the Syrian roads, which struck him as an omen full of evil, nor the hideous tame crow, the companion of the poor people from whom he accepted a cup of wine on the passage from Beirut to Saint Jean d'Acre, and which he looked upon as a messenger of woe sent him direct by fate. A tame crow was croak- ing and flapping its wings in the Rue de la Vieille- Lanterne also, on the landing-place of the filthy stairs, snow-spotted, close to the dread bars, and perhaps as he was dying poor Gerard de Nerval, by one of those swift returns of memory that so frequently occur at times of crisis, remembered the crow he had seen

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on the vessel's deck and that fascinated him with its ominous stare.

But at the time of which I am speaking not a single black cloud lowered on the dawn of his life, and it was impossible to note the germs of future disaster. No fortune teller who might have predicted his dismal fate would have been believed, as he traced in the distance the fatal rope, tenuous as a cobweb.

Let us, however, peacefully enjoy the cloudless dawn, and come back to the Gerard of those days whose name was not Gerard de Nerval, but Labrunic. Like Stendhal, he loved to conceal his individuality under various pseudonyms ; once he ascertained that he had been recognised under one of his false noses, he would cast it away and put on another mask and another domino. He signed his writings u Fritz, 9 ' u Aloysius," or with other names, and it is difficult now to make out his works in the dusty catacombs of journalism* Just as much as I courted notoriety did he seek the softened tints of half-light. I should have liked to march through the streets preceded by negro kettle-drummers and " followed by a hundred buglers blowing a blast/* but if he heard his name spoken, he disappeared at

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once. Popular papers, with a large circulation and a great literary reputation, endeavoured to get him on their staffs or to obtain articles from him. He pre- ferred to bury his writings in some obscure sheet, that paid little and had but a scant subscription-list, just as if it pleased him to have no readers, a curious kind of pleasure, but which one can understand in the case of certain proud and refined minds that are as much shocked by blundering praise as by coarse criticism. In those eccentric days when every man sought to make his mark by peculiarities of dress, soft felt Ru- bens hats, velvet cloaks with the end thrown over the shoulder, Van Dyck doublets, frogged jackets, Hunga- rian braided coats, or other exotic garments, Gerard dressed in the simplest, least noticeable manner, like a man who desires to mingle with the crowd without attracting attention. In summer, he wore black al- paca suits, and in winter a dark blue overcoat carefully made like everybody else's. It may be that he did not wish to be known, and

Diglto monstrari. et d'tceri : hie est^

until he should be worthy of fame and he had attained so close to his ideal as to bear being confronted with it without having to blush.

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I do not know why Gerard always had the reputa- tion of being the laziest of men. Other men have been treated to a similar reputation though they have worked hard all their lives and their works might fur- nish a pyre for them. On the contrary, the star-j^cr, the butterfly hunter, the blower of soap-bubbles, the so- called idler led the most active intellectual life. Under his outward calm, he lived in the fiercest of mental effervescence. It is to this period of his life that be- longs the " Laforct," in which he described Molicre at home, with the brave and sensible servant whom he did not disdain to consult, thinking her advice better than that of the Lysidas, the Dorantes, and other wits of the Court and the town. It was a pasticcio in Mo- liere's style, wrought out with thorough knowledge of the speech, the style, and the turns of expression of that seventeenth century so completely unknown to the modern Classicists who swear by it. The whole piece was wrought out hi a scale of harmoniously dull tones such as time gives to old tapestry. I do not know what became of this play, which, unless my memory plays me false, had been accepted by the Odcon.

Nor is it known in what drawer, the key of which has long been lost, in what trunk gone astray, or in

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what rat-haunted attic fetched up, after many vicissi- tudes, the u Prince of Fools," one of the cleverest and most successful imitations of the great " Devil plays " of the Middle Ages. The " Prince of Fools " which treated of a company of jugglers who made their way, under the pretext of giving a performance, into a feudal castle for the purpose of rescuing a fair lady held in durance vile by a tyrannical husband or father contained a play within a play, like those ivory balls which the patient Chinese carve, one out of another. It was a mystery after the Gothic manner, and its setting consisted of a blazing mouth of Hell, sur- mounted by a Paradise of starry azure. An angel who descended from the azure sphere threw dice with the devil, the latter staking souls, the former, I forget what. The angel cheated, through excess of zeal, and with the object of taking back as many of his friends into Paradise as he could. The devil lost his temper and called the angel tc great gawky fellow, sly fowl," and threatened, if he caught him again at his tricks, to pull every feather out of his wings, so that he would be unable to fly back to his Master. The quarrel grew bitter, and led to a row, under cover of which the lover, protected by the Prince of Fools,

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succeeded in carrying off his lady fair. The mystery was written in octosyllabic verse, like the ancient mysteries.

The " Prince of Fools " was preceded by a pro- logue, composed by me, and intended to prepare the public for the strangeness of the spectacle ; for plays in the style of the "Great Devil Play of Douai " and the " Estates of Death " were scarcely in the taste of the day. I had even added to the manuscript a coloured drawing representing the mouth of Hell with affected Gothic naivete. I mention this for the ben- efit of my dear friend and colleague Charles Asscli- neau, the Lindhurst of Romanticism, who is engaged in rescuing from oblivion all those books with strange illustrations and characteristic typography, which he catalogues, describes, and adorns with all the enthu- siastic minuteness of a true bibliophile.

Asselineau, like every refined being endowed by heaven with a pretty hobby, has his black tulip, his blue dahlia, his desideratum : he would like to possess the original manuscript of the u Prince of Fools." It is a vain ambition, an ideal that can never be realised* Yet he has sought it for many years, hoping and despairing, clinging to the faintest indication, moving

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mountains of papers, rummaging in the dusty collec- tions in theatres, the resting-place of failures. But ever in vain; the un discoverable manuscript flees before him in his obstinate pursuit it flees without even showing up once.

The manuscript of the cc Prince of Fools," unless some ignorant cook used it to burn ofT a chicken, was of oblong form and written upon blue paper that must have turned yellow with age. It was written through- out in Gerard's own neat, fine, well-ordered hand, with a broad margin on either side for the better setting ofF and airing of the verse. The prologue is in my hand- writing, but that does not create a contrast, for our hands were twin as were our hearts, and they were so alike that they were mistaken the one for the other.

That is all I can tell Asselineau, who will, I hope, come upon his blue dahlia, the symbol of eternal desire, which it is perhaps better never to come upon.

All the thoughts of youth were turned to the stage, the luminous centre towards which converged the most diverse forms of attention, from the most serious to the most frivolous, the stage, in front of which woman, dressed as if for a tourney, listens, claps her white gloved hands, seems to understand, to judge, and to

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award the palm. The press had not then begun to publish daily an instalment of a novel, so that the stage was the only tribune from which a poet could exhibit himself to the crowd, with the consequence that many a drama was written in our oenaculum.

It goes without saying that they were invariably refused. Nevertheless, I found it difficult to believe that they were absolutely bad, and I regretted the loss of a drama in verse by de Nerval, u The Lady of Carouge," to which I had largely collaborated, and which at least contained an original idea. It was the story of an Arab or Saracen Emir, brought back from Palestine by a crusading baron, and who had fallen in love with his captor's wife. The contrast between Islamism and Christianity, between the tent of the nomad and the feudal donjon, between the coldness of the North and the fiery passions of the desert, between savage ferocity and chivalry, expressed in verse that lacked neither vigour nor beauty, and certainly not technical skill at least, for Victor Hugo's pupils know how to write verse, seemed to me suited to bring out some dramatic situations. Such was the opinion of Alexandra Dumas, who, five or six years later, wrote on this subject, which Gerard de Nerval had no doubt

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told him of, " Charles VII. among his great Vassals." Only, in our case Yacoub bore the name of Hafiz. I considered it quite an honour that a character of my invention should have been thought worthy of being put on the stage and of serving as the pivotal figure in a drama by the author of " Henry III." and of " Christina at Fontainebleau."

To be done with the works of youth now lost, let me mention a drama drawn from Byron's touching and most pathetic poem, "Parisina," by Augustus MacKeat, Gerard, and myself. I remember it in the distant depths of that past as containing remarkable passages. Take it that these were the work of my collaborators, so that my modesty may not suffer over much, and you will be in the right. Maquet proved that he thoroughly understood the stage. I claim for myself but a few well-turned tirades, and you may take my word that they were so, although the work has been destroyed and the proof is not forth- coming.

Besides all this, Gerard had written a prose drama out of " Nicolas Flamel," a fragment of which, of great originality and remarkably effective, subsists in the columns of the " Mercure de France." Where is

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the rest of it ? It may be that Bibliophile Jacob knows. De Nerval was also busy with a social drama, the idea of which was somewhat like that of " Eugene Aram," and with a " Queen of Sheba," which never got as far as Solomon, and whose many adventures I shall relate to you. So for an idler he was a pretty hard-working man.

Gerard de NervaPs avoidance of the reputation he finally had to accept was not in the least, I am in a position to affirm it, the result of a plan to stimulate curiosity, but was due to rare conscientiousness and to the deepest respect for art. However carefully he wrought out his works, he still considered them too im- perfect, and to stamp them with his name struck him as a piece of puerile vanity.

He was one of the earliest translators of " Faust.*' It was a difficult task, at that time, to translate into our tongue, which had been rendered excessively timid, the strange and mysterious beauties of that ultra- Romanticist drama. Nevertheless, he succeeded in doing so, and the Germans, who pretend to be unin- telligible, had to confess themselves beaten. The German sphinx's riddle had been read by the French QEdipus.

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His familiarity with Goethe, Uhland, Burger, and Tieck imparted to Gerard's own work a certain shade of dreaminess which occasionally caused his own writ- ings to be mistaken for translations of those of un- known poets from beyond the Rhine. It was only In his thought, however, that this Teutonism showed, for few writers of our day wrote in more chastened, more clear and more transparent French than he did. Al- though, like all the successful writers of to-day, he took part in the great Romanticist movement of 1830, the style of the eighteenth century sufficed him for the expression of a whole range of fantastic and singular ideas. He writes a Hoffmannic tale with the pen of Cazotte, and in his cc Women of Cairo " one would swear it was Galland speaking with the tongue of Scheharazade. The most incredible eccentricity as- sumes, in his work, classical forms, so to speak. He has tender pallor, tones purposely deadened, faded tints, like those of tapestries in old castles, of wondrous har- mony and softness, far more satisfying than the brand- new gilding and the bright illuminations that men were so lavish of. Details, discreetly attenuated, allow the ensemble to retain its full importance, and against the background of soft neutral tints the figures the author

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desires to bring out show with an illusion of life truly magical, like those portraits painted on a background of vague shadow which irresistibly attract the glance.

Gerard de Nerval's sympathies and studies naturally drew him to Germany, which he often visited and where he made many a fruitful stay. The shadows of the old Teutonic oaks have more than once fallen upon his brow with confidential whispers ; he has wandered under the limes with the heart-shaped leaves ; he has saluted on the banks of the springs the white-robed elf whose wet white skirt drags through the green grass ; he has seen the crows flying about above the Kyff- hausen ; the kobolds have issued in his presence from out the cracks of the Hartz rocks, and the witches of the Brocken have danced round the young French poet, whom they took for a lena student, the great round of the Walpurgisnachtstraum. Happier than the rest of us, he has leaned upon the table from which Mcphistopheles brought out with his gimlet a stream of blazing wine. He descended the steps of that Berlin cellar down which too often stumbled the author of u Saint Sylvester's Eve" and "The Golden Jug/* With calm glance he has gazed upon the play of light pro- duced by the Rhine wine in the emerald-green roemer,

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and has noted the queer shapes of the smoke of the pipes as it rose above Hegelian discussions in aesthetic drinking-shops.

It is to these excursions that we owe charmingly fanciful pages that may be safely placed by the side of the best chapters in Sterne's "Sentimental Journey." The author, in the most unexpected manner, mingles reflection and reverie, fancifulness and reality, trips into fairyland and travels on the highway. Now he is mounted on a chimera with flapping wings, and now upon a lean hired hack, and from a comical incident he passes to an ethereal ecstasy. He can play upon a postilion's horn the enchanting melodies of Achin d'Arnim and Clement Brentano, and when he stops at the hop-covered door of an inn to drink the brown Miinchen beer, the stein turns in his hands into the cup of the King of Thule. As he walks along, lovely faces smile upon him out of the foliage, the student Anselmo's pretty snakes dance on the tips of their tails, while the flowers that carpet the bank on the other side of the ditch indulge in pantheistic conversations. The hidden life of Germany breathes in these fanciful walks, in which description turns into legend and per- sonal impressions into clever philosophical or literary

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remarks. Only, it is to be noted that the French vein is never broken by Teutonic divagations.

It is to this time of our author's life that belongs the fine drama called " Leo Burckart," which was per- formed at the Porte-Saint-Martin, and which is one of the most noteworthy works of the day. Leo Burckart is a journalist who has ventilated, in the paper he edits, such bold political ideas and such novel plans of reform as to lead people to fear the action of the authorities against him. Instead of causing his arrest, however, the Prince, convinced of Leo's sincerity, gives him the office of the minister the journalist has criticised, and orders him to apply his theories and to put his dreams into practice. Leo accepts and comes into direct con- tact with men and things, he, the free dreamer, who in his own study was so successful in balancing the world on the tip of his pen. Carried away by an abstract ideal, he seeks to govern without making use of the means of government. Like a minister of the Golden Age, he will not listen to the whispered com- munications of the police, and is therefore unaware that the life of the Prince is threatened and that his own honour is compromised. Looked upon by his former party as a traitor, distrusted by the Court.

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party, doing himself what he ought to have done through his subordinates, offending vested interests by exaggerated rigorism, walking blindly through the maze of intrigues, he loses his popularity after having been but a few months in power, loses his friends and almost his private honour, and thereupon resigns his office, having lost faith in his dreams and his talent, and scarce believing in man and in humanity. Yet no Machiavellian trap has been set for himj the Prince has loyally seconded him, and frankly aided the thinker.

The impression made by this drama, remarkable for its philosophical impartiality, would be gloomy were the play not brightened by an accurate and lifelike picture of the universities. Nothing can be more cleverly comical than the conspiracies of the students, for whom a drinking bout is the main interest in life, and who dream of Brutus as they fill their pipes. The play, the work of a poet who drank to intoxica- tion of the heady wine of German mysticism, seems, strange to say, the coolly wrought-out work of an old diplomat used to affairs and grown gray in the knowl- edge of men. There is no passion, no violence, not a single piece of declamation, but, on the other hand, in

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every part a clear and serene reason, an indulgence full of pity and understanding.

These works were followed by long trips in the East. "The Women of Cairo," and The Nights of Ramazan " mark this new period. It was a sudden transition from the mists of Germany to the sunshine of Egypt, and a less well-endowed nature might have been dazzled by it, but Gerard de Nerval, in his book, the success of which has grown with each successive edition, managed to avoid commonplace enthusiasm and the garish descriptions of ordinary tourists. He takes us into the very life of the East, which is closed so straightly against the man who travels rapidly. Under a transparent veil he has related his own adventures in the modest tone and the playful artlessness which make certain pages of the " Memoirs " of the Venetian Carlo Gc>y//,i such attrac- tive reading* The story of iCeynab, the lovely yellow slave purchased from the djellab in an impulse of philanthropical pity, and who is the cause of so many pretty Oriental incidents that disturb his trip, is told with perfect art and the utmost good taste. The Coptic weddings, the Arab marriages, the evenings with the opium eaters, the manners of the fellahs, all

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these details of Mohammedan life are described with uncommon cleverness, wit, and fidelity of observation. The legends of the East were bound to exercise great influence upon an imagination so easily excited as that of Gerard de Nerval, prepared, besides, long before for these poetical witcheries by the Sanscrit erudi- tion of Schlegel, the u Oriental-Occidental Divan'* of Goethe, and the " Ghazels " of Ruckert and Platen. The Legend of Khalif Hakem " and the " Story of Belkis and Solomon " prove how deeply Gerard de Nerval was filled with the profound and mysterious spirit of these strange stories in which every word con- tains a symbol. It may even be said that he thus acquired certain suggestions of one belonging to the inner circle, certain ways of illuminati which would lead at times to the belief that he is stating his own sentiments. I should not be greatly surprised to learn that he, like the author of " The Devil in Love," had received the visit of a stranger who used Masonic signs, and who was quite surprised to find that he was not a brother Mason, Preoccupied by thoughts of the in- visible world and of cosmogonic myths, he swung for a time in the circle of Swedenborg, Abbe Terrasson,

and the author of " The Count of Cabalis." But his _ _

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visionary tendencies are fully compensated for by studies of the utmost realism, such as those upon Spifane, Restif de la Bretonne, the fullest and most intelligent written upon this Balzac of the gutter, and which is as interesting as the best worked-out novel. u Sylvia," our writer's most recent work, strikes me as absolutely irreproachable. It is made up of memories of his childhood recalled by the lovely sites of Erme- nonville, by walks along flowery banks and by the side of the lakes, in the light mists reddened by the dawn, an idyl of the environs of Paris so pure, so fresh, so perfumed, so wet with dew, that it makes one uncon- sciously think of Daphnis and Chloe, of Paul and Virginia, of the chaste pairs of lovers who bathe their white feet in the springs or remain on the edge of the woods of Arcadia. It recalls a Greek statue with a light touch of pastel on lips and cheeks, due to the fancy of the sculptor.

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THE GREEN PORTFOLIO

EVERY time that I happen, when idle or sad, and impelled to plunge into the memories of the past, to open the old green portfolio, in which lie, more dusty than forgotten, the papers Gerard de Nerval used to leave in my rooms, as a bird drops its feathers as it goes, I am sure to lose myself in them for the rest of the day.

Among the notes, extracts, rough drafts, concise memoranda, articles begun, variants of the same thought turned over and over, philosophical or moral maxims condensed in golden Pythagorean verse, a form Gerard was particularly fond of, dramatic dialogues, numbered and cut like dressed stones waiting to be set in the vaulting, among all those bits of literary architectonics, scattered and mixed up to such an extent that no eye, not even that of friendship, can make out the plan, I occasionally come across letters of mine, scented with vinegar and slashed in the ports of the Levant by the

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scissors of the health officers, letters yellow as mummy- bandages, written to my friend while he was travelling in the East, and that, more fortunate than I, rode in his caravan. I re-read them, taking care not to tear them along the well-worn creases, and a low, soft, far-away voice, yet still recognisable, for it is my own, whispers in my ear, in well-known words, in turns habitual to me, thoughts and news then current in our world. How far off it all is now, swept away into deep forgetfulness by the swift darkness ! And yet how near still ; how little has the heart changed ! The same thoughts still meander through the convolutions of the brain, meeting and greeting each other at the same old places. Most of the sentences in those letters might have been written yesterday, and on arrival at their destination they would not have seemed any more old-fashioned than if they had been composed that very morning. Man docs not change as much as he fancies he does.

I come once more upon the paradoxes I indulged in of yore, and they are lively enough, considering their age; some of them, moreover, have since been accepted as truths. The judgments of my youth,

so insolently sincere, were not always dictated by

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strong feeling ; some are equitable and judicious, for one is sometimes in the right at twenty and in the wrong at sixty. A man should not deny his youth ; the grown man merely carries out the dreams of the youngster. Every fine work is a seed planted in April which will bloom in October. A man who has no ideas when he is twenty-one will never have any.

I pray to be forgiven for all this moralising, and for stringing aphorisms together as Sancho Panza was wont to string proverbs, while I sit opposite a portfolio half emptied of its contents. A multitude of bits of paper on which, in the form of condensed formulae, of mi- croscopic writing mingled with ciphers as difficult to read as the private notes of Raymond Lulli, Faust, or Herr Trippa, are summed, concentrated, sublimated like drops of elixir, all the doctrines of this world : theogonies, mythologies, religions, systems, interpreta- tions, glosses, Utopias, confusedly fluttering and whirl- ing, with here and there a hermeneutic or cabalistic sign, for Gerard did not disdain to call upon Nicolas Flamel, or to have a bit of talk with "the White Woman " and " the Red Servant," so that if one were to pick up one of these scraps, it would prove

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as engrossing as the cryptogram in Edgar Poe's u The Gold Bug," and require frightful intensity of attention. It will be best, therefore, to pick out of the bundle the following simple letter, less yellowed, less musty, less browned by the hellish reagents, and really con- taining only its evident meaning. As I place it in the light, it positively has a kindly, candid, sympathetic look. It was written by a friend dear to both of us, Bouchardy. In 1857 ^at l etter was but an auto- graph ; now it may take its place as a relic in the green portfolio consecrated to the memory of my dead friend. I shall transcribe it to show how refined and lovely was Bouchardy's soul, and how staunch was the friend- ship that united the members of our little company. Many years had elapsed since we had met at Petrus Borel's, and we had all scattered in quest of glory and daily bread. It will show, however, how green the memory of our friendship had remained :

^ ^ " January 12, 1857.

"DEAR THEOPHILE: J J ' 3/

" I should assuredly have kept deep within my heart the gratitude I feel for the kind and beautiful things you said of me in your article of January 5, but in the course of it you referred to the golden by-

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gone days of our friendship, and as that time con- stitutes the one and only remembrance of my youth, I must indulge in the delight of recalling it with you.

cc Nor, indeed, can we too often recall it, for it was the loveliest of our dreams, dreamed with wide-awake eyes, and hearts full of faith, of enthusiasm, and of love.

" We did not dream . . . when some unknown and swift current had borne us all together to the same shore, so that we might meet with echoes for our yet hesitating voices, and ardent souls for our bold and fervent ones.

"A blessed and fair meeting was that, my dear Theophile, in which each was to the brother who loved him a devoted friend, and a travelling companion who made one forget the length of the way and the fatigue of the journey.

u Meetings lovelier than can be told, those in which each and all wished for the success of all the others, without mad exaggeration or collective vanity $ in which each of us was ready to lend his shoulder to the foot of him who meant to try to climb and to succeed.

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u Which amongst us were rich or predestined ? We knew not, for we were a family that owned no Benja- min and recognised no right of primogeniture. Whilst the Fouricrists started phalansteries, the Saint-Simonians new social contracts, and the Democrats formed new plans, we, deaf to all these voices, heard only the whisper of art as it moved in the childbirth of prog- ress. Our only weapons were the pen, the brush, the lyre, and the sculptor's chisel ; our only gods were the great masters ; our only standard that of art, which we meant to unfurl and defend.

" Were we indebted to fortunate temperaments for these sublime thoughts ? or were we favoured by cir- cumstances ? It matters little > the golden beams that sought us out individually drew us towards each other and melted into one single treasury, from which we one and all drew, without ever exhausting it, faith, trust, confidence, enthusiasm, hope, and even generosity.

"How was it, friend of mine, that reflection that cools, anxiety that enervates, jealousy that parts, that all the evil passions that enter everywhere and at all times, could not penetrate into our meetings of old ?

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" It is a sweet and deep mystery, is it not ? which even now returns to our surprised and delighted hearts, like a vague reminiscence of blessed youth, of magnetic confraternity, of enchanted beatitude.

" It was a happy time, of which we ought to be proud, dear Theophile ; for when a man has travelled through life, so often saddened by bitterness, he ought to be proud of having enjoyed a few happy hours, and he ought to boast of that happiness. Remember !

"J, BOUCHARDY."

Rather more than a quarter of a century lies be- tween that letter and 1830. The remembrance is as sweet as if it were but of yesterday ; the feeling of enchantment still survives. From the land of exile where I am travelling, earning fame by the sweat of my brow, tramping through briars, over stones, and along roads bristling with man-traps, I look back with regretful, melancholy gaze upon the lost Paradise and yet I ate no apple and in no wise disobeyed our lord Hugo ! No doubt such delight could not last. It was impossible to conceive of a fairer mode of life than being young, intelligent, loving, capable of under- standing each other and communicating with the ele-

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ments of art , and so all those who lived that life are still dazzled by the memory of it. Just see how an allu- sion in a newspaper article tickles dear old Bouchardy to the very depths of his soul ; how he still answers to the call, how he remembers with quickening pulse ; how he is borne away in thought to the little room constellated with medallions by Jehan du Seigneur and sketches by Louis Boulanger, on one of those nights when we talked of art and the ideal, nature, form, and colour, and other like subjects, which then appeared to us, and rightly, of the most burning importance, just as they would be to-day. How ardently he would take part in the discussion now, and especially how intently he would listen.

That tender and simple letter from him whom we used to call the Maharajah of Lahore, the golden- skinned, blue-haired prince, and which I come upon by chance in the Field of the Dead of my portfolios, that shall soon be as crowded as the Fields of Eyoub and Scutari, has occupied my thoughts the whole day, and done away with the article I had intended to write. I had promised to relate the voyage of Belkis, the Queen of Sheba, whom Gerard de Ncrval had gone to fetch out of the depths of the Orient, in company with <le la

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Huppe, in order to bring her, he claimed, to Solomon, the erotic author of " Sir-Hasirim," but in reality to Meyerbeer, in Berlin, the author of "Robert the Devil," who wanted to get out of it a soprano part that would turn the head of every prima donna. But I could not manage it. Bouchardy's letter insisted upon being printed, as if it called out on behalf of our dead com- panions. The word REMEMBER, placed at the end of the letter, was put there in mysterious and com- manding fashion. Remember! Yes, I do remember, and this book is the proof that I do. Belkis may wait, for a few weeks will not age her whose youth is reck- oned by thousands of years. Those must first be heard who speak and move about under the earth like the moles and Hamlet's father.

All the same I had no end of interesting details to give you concerning the seventy-five pre- Adamite kings that appeared in the prologue, and which Meyerbeer, as timorous then as he was later, wished to cut out as being "dangerous;" concerning the divine Lilith also, Adam's first wife, and ancestress of the Queen of Sheba; also about the gown worn by Belkis, a gown fit to make Worth wonder, adorned as it was with seventy differ- ent kinds of gems, and the train of which was borne

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by a monkey, dressed in cloth of gold, that every now and then lifted it up with a lascivious grin. Nor should I have failed to describe the instinctive gesture which, causing Belkis to mistake the polished pavement for water, led her to lift up her skirts in the presence of Solomon.

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THE LEGEND OF THE RED WAISTCOAT

THE red waistcoat ! It is more than forty years since I wore it, yet people still spealc of it, and will go on speaking of it in days to come, so deep did that flash of colour penetrate the public's eye. If the name of Theophile Gautier hap- pens to be spoken in the presence of a Philistine, even of one who has never read a line of prose or verse of mine, he knows me at least by the red waistcoat I wore at the first performance of " Hernani," and he says, with the self-satisfied look of the man who knows what he is talking about : " Oh, yes. You mean the young fellow with the red waistcoat and the long hair." And that is the way I shall go down to pos- terity. My books, my verse, my articles, my travels will be forgotten, but men will remember my red waist- coat. That spark will go on shining when everything else of mine will long since have been lost in night,

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and it will set me apart from those of my contem- poraries whose works were no better than mine, but who wore dark-coloured waistcoats. Nor am I sorry to leave this impression behind me ; it has a certain grim haughtiness about it, and in spite of some youthful lack of taste, exhibits a not unpleasant contempt for public opinion and ridicule.

Any one acquainted with the French character will readily acknowledge that the mere fact of showing one's self in a theatre where what it is the custom to call tout Paris is assembled, with hair as long as Albert Durer's and a waistcoat as red as an Andalusian torero's muleta, calls for far more courage and strength of soul than is required by a man storming a redoubt bristling with death-dealing guns. For in every war numberless brave fellows perform that easy feat without having to be urged, while up to the present but one single French- man has been found daring enough to cover his breast with a piece of stuff of so aggressive, unusual, and dazzling a colour. Judging by the imperturbable dis- dain with which he affronted the glances of the audi- ence, it was easy to see that, if he had been in the least degree egged on, he would have turned up at the

second performance in a daffodil-yellow vest.

LEGEND OF THE RED WAISTCOAT

The utter amazement of the public and the persist- ence of an impression that ought not to have lasted beyond the close of the first act, must have been due less to the startling colour of the garment than to the heroic madness that thus exposed itself, with consum- mate coolness, to the sarcasm of the women, the pity of the old men, the contemptuous glances of the dandies, and the coarse laughter of the bourgeois.

I did try to tear off that waistcoat of Nessus that clung to my skin, and failing to do so I bravely put up with it in spite of the fancy of the bourgeois, who can never think of me as dressed in any other colour, in spite of the negrohead, bronze-green, maroon, iron- gray, soot-black, London-smoke, steel-gray, rotten-olive, bad-pickle, and other tasteful shades of overcoats in neutral tones, such as may be discovered, after long meditations, by a civilisation that has no sense of colour.

The case is the same with my hair. I have worn it cut short, but in vain, it was always assumed to be long ; and even had I exhibited in the orchestra stalls a hairless, ivory-coloured skull, shining like an ostrich's egg, people would still have maintained that great waves of Merovingian locks flowed down upon my

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shoulders. Most ridiculous ! So I have allowed the little I have to grow as it pleases, and it has turned the permission to account, the traitor, and given me a little bit the look of a Romanticist Absalom.

I stated at the outset of these reminiscences, how it was that I came to be recruited by Gerard into the company of u Hernani " in Rioult's studio, and how I was intrusted with the command of a small squad that answered to the password Hlerro. That evening was to be, in my opinion, and rightly too, the greatest event of the age, since it was to inaugurate free, youthful, and new thought upon the debris of old routine ; and I therefore wished to solemnise the occasion by a specially splendid dress, by an eccentric and gorgeous costume that should do honour to the Master, the school, and the play. At that time the painter student still prevailed in me over the poet, and I was much preoccupied with the interests of colour. As far as I was concerned the world was divided into flamboyants and dullards, the former the object of my love, the latter of my aversion. I wanted a return to life, light, movement, audacity in thought and execution, to the fair times of the Renaissance and real antiquity, so that I rejected the faint colouring, the thin, dry drawing,

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and the compositions that looked like groups of lay figures, which the Empire had bequeathed to the Restoration.

These distinctions applied to literature also in my mind. Diderot was a flamboyant for me, Voltaire a dullard, just as Rubens and Poussin were similarly contrasted. But I had in addition a special taste, love for red. I adored that noble colour, now dis- honoured by political fury, for it is purple, blood, life, light, and heat, and it harmonises admirably with gold and marble. It was therefore with genuine grief that I saw it disappearing from modern life and even from painting. Before 1789 a man might wear a scarlet mantle braided with gold, but now, in order to get a glimpse of the proscribed colour, I was reduced to watch the Swiss guards relieving sentries, or to look at the red coats of English fox-hunters in the windows of print- sellers. Did not " Hernani " offer a sublirne oppor- tunity to restore red to the position it should never have lost ; and was it not proper that a young, lion- hearted painter student should declare himself the champion of Red, and flout the detested colour in the faces of the Grays, of that crowd of Classicists equally

hostile to the splendours of poetry ? These oxen, I

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resolved, should behold red before their eyes, and should hear the verse of Hugo.

I do not intend to attempt to correct a legend, but I am bound to say that the waistcoat was, as a matter of fact, a doublet cut on the pattern of the Milanese globose breastplates and the Valois doublets, busked to a point on the stomach and ridged down the centre. I have been told that I possess a very full vocabulary, but I cannot find words to express the amazed look of my tailor when I described the kind of waistcoat I wanted. " He remained speechless," and Lebrun's studies in expression, at the page marked " Astonish- ment," have no faces with eyes wider open, eyebrows more uplifted, and more wrinkles at the top of the forehead, than the face of my worthy Gaulois such was his name at that moment. He thought me crazy, but respect prevented his giving voice to his feelings, out of deference to a family he thought highly of; he merely objected in a timid voice:

u But that is not the fashion, sir."

" Well, it shall be the fashion, once I have worn it," I replied with a coolness worthy of Beau Brum- mel, Nash, Count d'Orsay, or any other celebrated dandy.

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" I do not understand the cutting of it. It is more of a theatrical costume than a town suit, and I may make a mess of it."

" I am going to give you a pattern in gray linen, drawn, cut, and basted by myself. You can fit it. It hooks down the back like the waistcoats of the Saint- Simonians, but is in no wise symbolical."

" Very well, very well. My fellow-craftsmen will laugh at me, but I shall do what you want. Now, of what stuff is this precious garment to be made ? "

I drew from a coffer a splendid piece of cherry or Chinese vermilion satin, and triumphantly unfolded it before my terrified 'tailor, with an air of calm satisfac- tion that revived his fears that I was out of my mind. The light shimmered and gleamed upon the folds of the stuff, which I rumpled in order to bring out the play of light and shade, making it run through the warmest, the richest, the most ardent, the most delicate shades of red. In order to avoid wearing the infamous red of '93, 1 had admitted a slight admixture of purple in the dye, for I was very desirous not to be sus- pected of any political intention. I was not an ad- mirer of Saint-Just and Maximilian Robespierre, as were some of my comrades, who posed as the Mon-

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tagnards of poetry, but I was rather a mediaeval, steel- clad feudal baron, ready to intrench myself against the invasion of the age in the stronghold of Goetz von Berlichingen, as was proper in a page of the Victor Hugo of that day, who had also his tower in the Sierra. In spite of the easily understood repugnance of worthy Gaulois, the doublet was duly made, was hooked behind, and, save for the fact that it was the only one of that cut and colour in the theatre, became me as well as a fashionable waistcoat. The rest of my dress consisted of trousers of a very light sea- green, with a black velvet band down the outer seam, a black coat with very broad velvet facings turned well back, and a full gray overcoat lined with green satin. Round my neck I wore a moire ribbon, which answered the double purpose of a shirt collar and a necktie. I am bound to confess that this costume was well devised to irritate and scandalise the Philistines. Nor are you to imagine that I have improved on what the costume really was. My description is strictly accurate. In "Victor Hugo's Life told by an Eye-Witness" are these words : " The only eccentricity was in the costumes, and for that matter, it was sufficient to horrify the occupants of the boxes. People pointed

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with horror to M. Theophile Gautier, whose flaming waistcoat blazed that evening above a pair of light gray trousers, with a black velvet stripe, and whose hair escaped from under the broad brim of a flat hat. The impassibility of his pale, regular features, and the cool- ness with which he looked at the respectable people in the boxes showed to what depths of abomination and desolation the drama had fallen."

Yea, verily, I did look at them with contempt, these larvae of the past and of routine, at all those foes of art, of idealism, of liberty, and of poetry, who sought to close the gates of the future with their palsied hands, and in my heart burned fierce desire to scalp them with my tomahawk and to hang these trophies at my belt. In trying to do this, however, I should have run the risk of getting more wigs than heads of hair, for if the Classicist school gibed at the long hair of the modern school, it displayed, on the other hand, round the balconies of the Theatre-Fran $ais a collection of bald heads comparable to the chaplet of skulls of the god Dourga. This fact was so self-evident that at the sight of these yellow skulls uprising from between the triangular shirt-collars, with flesh tones the colour of rancid butter, and malevolent in spite of their paternal

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look, a young sculptor of much wit and talent, who has since become famous, and whose witticisms are as admirable as his statues, shouted amid the tumult : " Guillotine all those knee-caps ! "

I must beg my reader to forgive my keeping them waiting so long upon the threshold of " Hernani," while I am talking of myself. It is not my custom to sin in this way, and if I knew how to abstract myself wholly from my work, I should do it. But the super- natural apparition, the fierce and meteoric flaming of my scarlet doublet on the horizon of Romanticism having been called " a sign of the times," to quote the "Revue des Deux Mondes," and having preoccupied this nineteenth century of ours that had surely something better to do, I have been compelled to do violence to my natural modesty and to bring myself forward for a moment, seeing that I it was who wore that wondrous doublet.

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FIRST PERFORMANCE OF "HERNANI"

FEBRUARY 25, 1830 ! That date stands out in my past in letters of fire ; it is that of the first performance of " Hernani." That one evening moulded my whole life. It was then I felt the impulse which yet drives me on, though so many years have elapsed, and which will keep me going to the end of my career. Though much time has gone by, I still feel the same sensation of dazzling beauty ; the enthusiasm of my youth has not waned, and when- ever I hear the magic sound of the horn, I prick up my ears like an old war-horse ready to rush into battle again.

The young poet, with proud audacity and conscious- ness of genius, preferring, besides, glory to success, had obstinately refused the assistance of the paid cohorts that perform an accompaniment to a successful per- formance, and help out failures. These paid applauders

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have a taste of their own, just like Academicians. Generally speaking they were Classicists, and they would have applauded Victor Hugo most unwillingly; their favourites at that time were Casimir Delavigne and Scribe, so that Hugo ran the risk, if matters went wrong, of being left in the lurch in the thick of the fight. There was talk of cabals, of intrigues secretly entered upon, almost of snares, even, prepared to kill the play and to get rid of the new school at one fell swoop. Literary hatred is fiercer by far than political hatred, for it sets in motion the most sensitive fibres of self-love, and the triumph of the adversary proclaims the other man a fool. Therefore the most respectable people in the world are ready to resort, in such cases, to any infamous tricks, big or little, without the least compunction.

Brave as Hernani might be, it would never do to leave him to fight the battle alone against a prejudiced and riotous pit, against boxes apparently more sedate, but no less dangerous under their politely concealed hostility, and whose sneers buzz most importunately under the hisses, more open, at least, in their attacks. The Romanticist youth, full of ardour and rendered fanatical by the preface to u Cromwell," resolved to

PERFORMANCE OF "HERNANI"

support "the mountain hawk," as Alarcon calls "The Weaver of Segovia/' It offered its services to the Master, who accepted them. No doubt such a mass of fire and enthusiasm might prove dangerous, but timidity was not the weak point of that time. Small squads were enrolled in the band of supporters, each man bearing as a pass the square of red paper with the word Hierro inscribed upon it. All these details are well known, and I need not dwell upon them.

The smaller fry of the press of that day and polemi- cal writers took pleasure in describing as a rabble of sordid roughs these young fellows, all of whom belonged to good families, who were well educated, well bred, crazy about art and poetry, some of them writers, some painters, some composers, others sculptors or architects or critics, or in some way busied with things literary, It was not Attila's filthy, fierce, unkempt, ignorant Huns that were encamped in front of the Theatre- Fran$ais, but the knights of the future, the champions of thought, the defenders of the freedom of art ; and they were handsome, free, and young. They had hair, that goes without saying, for a man cannot be born with a wig on, and plenty of hair, falling in soft and

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shining curls, for they combed it carefully. Some wore small mustaches and others full beards ; that is quite true, but this fashion became their clever, proud, bold faces, which the Renaissance masters would willingly have taken for models.

The "brigands of thought," as Philothee O'Neddy put it, did not, it must be owned, resemble your snug notary, but their costumes, marked by the expression of individual taste and due feeling for colour, lent them- selves better to painting. Satin and velvet, braids and frogs and fur collars and cuffs were surely as good as the swallow-tailed coats, the short-waisted waistcoats of silk, the starched muslin cravats into which chins were sunk, and the corners of white linen shirt-collars that rose like blinders on either side of the gold-spec- tacled noses. Even the soft felt hat and the jacket of the young students not rich enough to realise their dreams of costumes after the fashion of Rubens and Velasquez, were more elegant than the stove-pipe hat and old dress- coat with rumpled folds of the old frequenters of the Corned ie-Fran^aise, horrified at the invasion of these young Shakesperian barbarians.

Do not, therefore, believe a word of all the tales told of our company.

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It would have been sufficient to admit our battalion an hour before the general public, but with perfidious intention, and no doubt in the hope that there would occur a row of some sort necessitating the interference of the police, the doors were opened at two in the afternoon, involving an eight hours' wait before the raising of the curtain. The auditorium was not lighted ; theatres are dark by day and are illumined at night only. Evening is their dawn, and light penetrates in them only when it dies out of the heavens. This oversetting of things is in accord with their factitious life ; while reality is at work, fiction sleeps.

Strange indeed is the aspect of the interior of a theatre during the day. The great height and size of the auditorium, increased by its emptiness, make one feel as if within a cathedral nave. The place is sunk in a faint darkness, into which fall, through an opening above or the pane in the door of a box, dim rays, a bluish light contrasting with the quivering red beams of the service lanterns scattered around in numbers suffi- cient, not to illumine, but to make the darkness visible. A visionary's eye, like that of Hoffmann, would easily see in it the setting of a fantastic tale. I had never been in a theatre by day, and when our company burst

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in, like a flood pouring through a broken dam, I was struck by this Piranesi-like effect.

We piled in as comfortably as we could on the uppermost seats, in the dark corners of the gods, on the rear seats of the balconies, in every suspicious and dangerous recess where might post themselves owners of shrill-toned keys, maddened claqueurs, starched wise- acres in love with Campistron and fearing a massacre of the busts by us septembriseurs of a new sort. We were scarcely more comfortable than Don Carlos would presently be within the cupboard, but the worst places had been reserved for the most enthusiastic, just as in war the most perilous posts are given to the reckless fellows who love to plunge into the thick of danger. The others, not less trusty, but more sedate, occupied the pit, drawn up in order under the eye of their leaders and ready to fall as one man upon the Philistines at the least sign of hostility on their part.

Six to seven hours waiting in the dark, or at least in the half-darkness of a theatre in which the great chandelier has not been lighted, is pretty long, even when after the darkness "Hernani" is to rise like

the sun in his glory.

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We began talking about the play and what we knew of it. Some of us, who were more intimate with the Master, had heard him read portions of it, and remem- bered a few lines, which they quoted and which awoke the liveliest enthusiasm. A new u Cid " was to appear in this play, the work of a young Corneille, no less proud, no less haughty and Castilian than the first, but who had turned to Shakespeare. The various names that ought to have been given to the play were dis- cussed. Some regretted that the name of " Three for One," had not been retained, for it struck them as a genuine Calderon title, a cloak and sword appellation, thoroughly Spanish and Romanticist, in the style of " Life is a Dream/' and " April and May Morns." Others rightly considered that the title, or rather subtitle, of the play, " Castilian Honour," was more serious. Most preferred " Hernani " alone, and it is their view that eventually prevailed, for it is the name that the drama has since been known by, and which, to use a Homeric expression, flits, a winged name, upon the lips of men.

Ten years later I was travelling through Spain. Be- tween Astigarraga and Tolosa, we traversed, at the top speed of our mules, a village half ruined in the course

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of the war between the Christinos and the Carlists. Through the darkness I could make out the walls with great coats of arms carved above the doors and black windows with complicated iron-work, gratings, and rich balconies, testifying to bygone splendour. I asked the zagal who was running by the side of the carriage, his hand resting upon the sharp backbone of the off mule, the name of the village, and he answered, " Erna- ni." On hearing these three syllables, so full of mem- ories, the drowsiness that had come over me, after a fatiguing day, vanished at once, and through the inces- sant tinkling of the mules' bells there sounded like a far-away sigh the faint blast of Hernani's horn. I saw again in a flash the proud mountaineer in his buff jer- kin, his green sleeves, and his red hose ; Don Carlos, in gilded armour ; Dona Sol, pale and robed in white ; Ruy Gomez de Silva standing before the portraits of his ancestors, in a word, the whole of the play. I even seemed to hear the row that went on at the first performance.

When Victor Hugo, still a child, returned from Spain to France after the fall of King Joseph, he must have traversed this place, the aspect of which is unchanged, and heard a postilion speak that strange, high-sounding

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name, so well suited to verse, and which, ripening later in his brain, like a seed forgotten in a corner, bloomed out into the magnificent drama.

We were beginning to feel hungry. The most prudent among us had brought chocolate and rolls; some, with bated breath be it spoken, saveloys ; evil- minded Classicists maintain these were flavoured with garlic. I do not believe they were, but had they been garlic is classical, for in Vergil Thestylis crushed garlic for the harvesters. The meal finished, a few ballads of Hugo's were sung, and then some of those endless studio rigmaroles that, like a water-wheel with its buckets, incessantly bring in the refrain with the same old piece of nonsense in it ; next we indulged in imita- tions of the cries of the various animals in the Ark, which their descendants in the Zoological Gardens would have considered faultless. Innocent practical jokes, such as are loved of young painter students were got off; the heads, or rather the scalps of a few Aca- demicians were called for ; dreams from classical trage- dies were recited, and all sorts of liberties taken with the good old goddess Melpomene, who, little accus- tomed to having her marble peplum rumpled in this fashion, must have felt no end of astonishment at it.

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Meantime the great chandelier was slowly being lowered from the ceiling with its triple row of gas-jets and its prismatic scintillations. The footlights were being lighted and drew between the world of reality and the world of fiction a luminous line of demarcation. The candelabra began to flame out in the stage-boxes, and the place was gradually filling up. The doors of the boxes opened and closed noisily. The ladies, who were installing themselves as for a prolonged sit- ting, easing their shoulders out of their low-necked dresses and settling themselves in their skirts, laid their bouquets and their glasses on the velvet-covered rail. Although our school has been reproached with the love of the ugly, I am bound to say that the hand- some, young, and pretty women were warmly cheered by our passionate youthful band, a performance which the old and ugly of their sex looked upon as shockingly improper and in the worst of taste. Those we cheered hid their faces behind their bouquets with a forgiving smile,

The orchestra stalls and the balcony were paved with academical and Classicist bald-heads. A stormy rumour made itself heard in the theatre ; it was time the cur- tain went up. We might have come to blows before

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the play began, so great was the animosity between the two parties. At last the three knocks were heard. The curtain rose slowly, and in a small sixteenth-cen- tury bed-chamber, lighted by a small lamp, was seen the elderly Dona Josefa Duarte, the bodice of her dress embroidered with jet, in the fashion of the times of Isabella the Catholic, listening for the rap at the secret door by which is to enter the lover awaited by her mistress.

" Serait-ce deja lui ? C'est bien al'escalier Derobe "

(Can it be he ? It is surely at the private Door )

The fight was on. That word summarily chucked into the next line, that audacious overflow, impertinent even, was like a professional swashbuckler, a Saltabadil, a Scoronconcolo smacking the face of Classicism and challenging it to a duel.

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XII

H E R N A N I "

WHAT! With the very first words the orgy is already in full swing ! Verse is smashed up and the pieces thrown from the windows ! " said a Classicist admirer of Voltaire, with the indulgent smile of wisdom beholding folly.

He was a tolerant man, after all, and would not have objected to prudent innovations provided the French tongue had been respected, but such careless- ness at the very outset had to be condemned in a poet, no matter what his principles, whether Liberal or Royalist, might be.

u It is not a piece of carelessness, it is a beauty," replied a Romanticist from Deveria's studio, tawny as Cordova leather and with a shock of thick red hair like a figure in Giorgione's paintings.

" c C'est bien a Tescalier

Derobe.'

"HERNANI"

44 Do you not see that the word derobe^ removed and as it were suspended beyond the line, describes admirably the stair of love and mystery that winds in the thickness of the manor wall ? It is marvellously architectonic, full of sixteenth-century feeling, and reveals the deepest acquaintance with a whole vanished civilisation."

Deveria's ingenious pupil no doubt saw too many things in that overflow, for his remarks, carried to excessive length, aroused calls for order and requests that he should be put out, the growing earnestness of which soon reduced him to silence.

It would be a difficult task to describe the effect produced upon the audience by the striking, virile, vigorous verse, that had so strange a ring, and a swing that recalled at once both Corneille and Shakespeare, for nowadays the very innovations that then were con- sidered barbarisms are accounted classical. It must also be carefully borne in mind that in France, at that time, abhorrence of plain speaking and of the use of crude words was carried to a fairly unimaginable extent. And with the best will in the world, all one can do now is to conceive of this abhorrence from an his- torical point of view, as is done concerning certain

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motives or prejudices the very causes of which have disappeared.

To-day, when witnessing a performance of " Her- nani," and following the play of the actors upon an early copy of the piece, marked on the margins with the thumb-nail to indicate the parts at which the tumult broke out, or where the performance was interrupted or the work hissed, and which are the very passages that now provoke outbursts of applause, passages that were then fields of battle well trampled over, redoubts that were stormed and retaken, ambushes where one lay in wait round the corner of an epithet, relays of hounds ready to spring at the throat of a hunted metaphor, it is impossible not to experience a sensation of surprise which the present generation, for ever freed from all that nonsense by the valiant efforts we put forth in times of old, can never fully share.

How can one explain, for instance, that this

line,

Est-il minuit ? Minuit bientot " (Is it midnight ? It is about to strike) ,

should have raised a storm and that the battle raged for three days around that hemistich ? It was adjudged to

150

dbdb 4? ^fc 4? 4? 4? i ifc 4? ^^dt^tfcdbdbtfedbtfett? dbs?t&

"HERNANI"

be trivial, familiar, improper. Behold a king asking what time it is in the language of a commoner, and answered as though he were a clodhopper ! Serve him right ! If he had used a fine periphrasis, he would have been replied to politely, somewhat in this

fashion :

" 1'heure Atteindra bientot sa derniere demeure."

( the time Will soon have reached its latest hour.)

Not only was plain speaking objected to in verse, the public also kicked against epithets, metaphors, compari- sons, poetic expressions, in a word, and to put it briefly, against lyricism, with its rapid flights to nature, the uplifting of the soul above prosaic situations, the flashing of poetry in the drama, so frequent in Shake- speare, Calderon, and Goethe, and so rare in our great masters of the seventeenth century that in the whole drama of that period there are but two picturesque verses, the one in Corneille, the other in Moliere ; the first in the u Cid," the second in the remarks of Orgon, just returned from the country and warming his hands before the fire. Corneille's line is a splendid bit of padding, wrought by powerful hands out of

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the cedar of the celestial abodes in order to furnish the rime to " voiles " which he needed :

" Cette obscure clarte qui tombe des etoiles." (The dusky light of the stars of night.)

Moliere's line

"La campagne a present n'est pas beaucoup fleurie ** (But few blooms now are in the meadows strewn)

expresses a feeling of commonplace comfort and the satisfaction of no longer being exposed to the vicissi- tudes of the weather, though it also reminds one, in that sombre Parisian home, in which tortuous intrigue writhes like a snake, that out in the country there is yet greenery, and that man is ever surrounded by nature, even though he scarcely ever glances at it.

This novel spectacle interested the evil-wishers. They followed closely the action of the play, so vigor- ously initiated, and more than once they renounced the pleasure of interrupting or expressing disapproba- tion, for the pleasure of listening. There were moments when the poet's genius mastered the love of routine and the malevolent instincts of the crowd, which rebels against any new ascendency and is apt to think that it admires quite enough men as it is.

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In spite of the terror inspired by Hugo's partisans, who were scattered about in small parties and who were easily recognised by their peculiar costumes and their fierce looks, there sounded in the theatre the low roar of the excited crowd, which is no more to be stilled than the roar of the sea. The wrought up feelings of an audience always burst out and manifest themselves by unmistakable signs. It needed only to cast a glance at the public to learn that this was no ordinary performance ; that two systems, two parties, two armies, two civilisa- tions it is no exaggeration to put it so were facing each other, filled with cordial reciprocal hatred of the intense literary kind, ready to come to blows and long- ing for a fight. The general attitude was one of hos- tility ; elbows were stuck out, the least friction would have sufficed to cause an outbreak, and it was easy to see that the long-haired youth considered the clean- shaven gentleman an atrocious idiot, and would not long refrain from giving expression to his private opinions.

In point of fact, minor rows, speedily suppressed, broke out when Don Carlos indulged in some of his Romanticist pleasantries, when Don Ruy Gomez de Silva swore by Saint John of Avila, and when were

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noted certain touches of Spanish local colour borrowed from the ct Romancero" for the sake of greater accu- racy. But it was plain that the mingling of familiarity and grandeur, of heroism and passion and moodish- ness in Hernani, and of Homeric tautology in old Silva, aroused the deepest resentment among that portion of the audience that did not form part of Hugo's salteadores.

The De ta suite fen suis ! (In thy train ! I am indeed !) which ends the first act became, I need not say, a theme for endless jokes on the part of the numerous tribe of the clean-shaven ; but the lines in the monologue are so fine that even when repeated by these idiots they remained wonderful.

Mile. Gay, who was later Mme. Delphine de Girar- din, and who even then was famous as a poet, at- tracted universal attention by her blonde beauty. She had naturally the pose and the dress she has in the well- known portrait of her that Hersent painted : a white dress, blue scarf, long golden curls, her arm bent, and one finger pressed against her cheek in an attitude of attentive admiration. She was a Muse who seemed to be intently listening to Apollo. Lamartine and Victor

Hugo were great friends of hers ; she worshipped their

"HERNANI"

genius to the last, and only when cold in death did her lovely hand drop the censer. On that evening, on that forever memorable first performance of "Her- nani," she applauded like the veriest student, in his place before two o'clock, thanks to his red card the shocking beauties, the revolting traits of genius.

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THE REVIVAL OF "HERNANI"

(Juneai, 1867)

IT is thirty-seven years ago that, thanks to the square of red paper stamped with the word Hierro^ I entered the Theatre-Fran<jais long before the hour at which the performance was to begin, in the company of young poets, young painters, young sculp- tors we were all young then ! enthusiastic, filled with faith, and resolved to conquer or die in the great literary battle about to be fought out. It was February 25, 1830, the day of " Hernani," a date that no Ro- manticist has forgotten and that the Classicists perhaps remember, for the fight was waged bitterly by both parties. Happy days, indeed, when intellectual matters could so highly excite the masses !

Nor was the emotion I felt last Thursday any less deep. Thirty-seven years ! Twice as much as the span that Tacitus calls " a great space in human life." Alas ! of the old Romanticist battalions but few veterans are left j the survivors, however, were present,

THE REVIVAL OF "HERNANI"

and it was with melancholy pleasure that I recognised them in the stalls or the boxes, and that I thought of the trusty comrades long since dead. True, " Her- nani " no longer needs its veteran guard, for no one thinks nowadays of attacking it. The public has fol- lowed the example set by Don Carlos ; it has forgiven the rebel and restored all his titles. Hernani is now John of Aragon, grand master of Avis, Duke of Se- gorba and Duke of Cardona, Marquis of Monroy, Count Albatera ; Donna Sol's arms cling round his neck above the collar of the Golden Fleece, and but for the imprudent pact entered into with Ruy Gomez, he would be perfectly happy.

But it was not so of yore, and night after night Hernani had to blow his horn to summon his mountain hawks, that not infrequently bore away in their talons a Classicist scalp as a token of victory. Certain lines were stormed and restormed like redoubts that two armies fight for with equal obstinacy. One evening the Romanticists triumphed with a passage that the enemy captured the next night, and from which it had to be driven. What a din there was ! What shouts ! What hoots ! What hisses ! What bursts of bravos ! What thunders of applause ! The leaders of the con-

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tending parties insulted each other like the heroes of Homer before they came to blows, and at times, I am bound to confess, they were not more courteous than Achilles and Agamemnon. But the winged words flew up to the top of the house and attention was quickly recalled to the stage.

We would come out at the close of the performance worn out and breathless ; elated when the evening had been a fortunate one for us, cursing the Philistines when we had suffered a reverse; and until every man had re- gained his home, the echoes of night gave back frag- ments of Hernani's monologue or of Don Carlos' ; for one and all we knew the play by heart, and even now, if need were, I could do the prompting from memory.

To the generation of that day " Hernani " was what the " Cid " had been to Corneille's contemporaries. Whoever was young, valiant, in love, or poetical, was filled with the breath of it. The fine heroical and Castilian exaggeration, the splendid Spanish pomposity, the language at once so proud and haughty in its familiarity, the images so dazzlingly strange intoxicated us, made us ecstatic, and turned our heads with their entrancing poetry. Undoubtedly the author of " Her- nani " has written plays as beautiful, as complete, and

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perhaps even more dramatic than that one, but none of them fascinated us to such an extent.

But there, like Nestor, the good knight of Gerennia, I am, though I have not reached his age, telling stories and informing the men of to-day of what the men of yore were. Let us, as is proper, leave the past for the present, and return to last Thursday's performance. The hall was filled by as large and as interested an audience as on February 25, 1830, but there was no longer any antagonism between Romanticists and Classicists ; the two , parties had fused into one, and applauded together without the least discord arising between them. The passages that had formerly ex- cited opposition were, with delicate attention, espe- cially applauded, as if to compensate the poet for the injustice done him of yore. Time has gone by, the public has become educated little by little, and the very things that revolted it before, now are taken as a matter of course. The supposed defects have turned into beauties, and men are surprised to find themselves shedding tears over passages they laughed at, and be- coming enthusiastic over others that they once hissed. The prophet did not go to the mountain, but, contrary to the Islamic legend, the mountain drew near to him.

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With the lapse of time the work itself has gained a magnificent patina, the violent colouring has toned down, the harsh touches have become softened, and the fierce impasto has disappeared as under a golden var- nish that softens and warms at one and the same time. It exhibits the sober richness, the masterly and broad touch seen in those portraits by Titian in which the painter to Charles V has depicted a great personage, with his coat of arms in one corner of the canvas.

In his preface to the play, the author, speaking of himself, said : " He [the author] dare not flatter him- self that every one understood at the first attempt the drama itself, the real key to which is the c Romancero general.* He begs those who have been shocked by his work to re-read the c Cid,' c Don Sancho of Ar- agon,' c Nicomedes,' or rather the whole of Corneille and Moliere, the great and admirable poets. This, after allowing for the vast inferiority of the author of

Hernani/ may cause them to be less severe towards

certain things, either in the matter or form of the drama, which may have offended them."

These few lines contain the secret of the Roman- ticist style, derived from Corneille, Moliere, and Saint- Simon, with some touches of Shakespeare in the matter

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of images. Racine alone appears classical to the re- fined people who, as a general rule, do not much care for the virile poets and the vigorous prose-writer I have just named. It is that form of speech which they dislike in modern poets in general, and in Hugo in particular.

It gives one the liveliest pleasure to see, after hav- ing had to endure so many melodramas and vaude- villes, this work of genius, with its characters larger than life, its mighty passions, its mad lyricism, and its action which seems to be a legend drawn from the " Romancero " and put upon the stage like that of the Cid Campeador. And especially is it delightful to listen to that beautiful, richly coloured verse, so poetic, so firm and yielding, lending itself to the rapid famil- iarity of the dialogue, in the course of which the retorts cross like sword-blades and strike fire, or again soaring with the wings of an eagle or a dove in mo- ments of reverie and of love.

As the great monologue of Don Carlos before the tomb of Charlemagne was being spoken, I seemed to be ascending a stair, every step of which was a verse, leading to the top of a cathedral spire, from which the world appeared to me as in a Gothic woodcut of a

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cosmography, with pointed steeples, crenelated towers, palaces, garden walls, carved roofs, zig-zagging ram- parts, bombards set on their carriages, spirals of smoke, and in the background a swarming population. The poet excels in such lofty, wide views of the ideas, the appearance, or the politics of an epoch.

The play, entitled " Hernani, or Castilian honour," has for a fate el pundonor, the ananke of so many Span* ish comedies. John of Aragon yields to it, but not without regret; life is so sweet to him when he hears the sound of the horn that recalls the forgotten oath; and he dies with Donna Sol rather than he re- deems his pledge. But there, my old habit of analy- sis is running away with me again, and I am telling the story of " Hernani."

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EUG&NE DEVERIA

Born in 1805 Died in 1865

NASCENT Romanticism built the highest hopes upon Eugene Deveria. Darkness and forgetfulness have long since fallen upon his fame, which arose in a blaze of splendour, admiration, and enthusiasm. No man ever started so brilliantly or held out fairer promise. When he exhibited his "Birth of Henry IV" the French had every reason to believe that they were about to have a Paolo Veronese of their own, and that a great colour- ist was born unto them. The artist who thus made himself known by a masterpiece was scarcely twenty- two 5 he was born in 1805, and his painting bears the date 1827. Everything might be expected from so well endowed a painter, but his fine rush soon slackened ; his inspiration was deadened by some mysterious influence, the expected masterpieces did not materialise, and the present generation cannot,

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therefore, imagine how important was the part played by Eugene Deveria in his own day.

He was then a tall, handsome, athletic young fellow with proud, bold look. He wore his hair cropped short, fiercely curled mustaches, and a long, pointed beard, the terror of the shaven bourgeois. Beards, so generally worn nowadays, were then still considered ferocious, barbarous, and monstrous. But Romanticist painters were not in the least anxious to look like smug lawyers, and strove by every means in their power to present the strongest possible contrast to the Philistines. No Venetian of the sixteenth century was fonder of gorgeousness in dress than Eugene Deveria ; he loved satins, damask, and gems, and would gladly have gone about in a brocade gown like one of the magntficoes in the paintings of Titian or Bonifazio. As he could not quite wear the costume that became his talent, he did his best to modify the hideous modern male attire. He wore coats cut well open and turned back over the shoulders, with broad shim- mering velvet facings, and the chest well brought out by waistcoats cut after the fashion of a doublet. His hats were made after the pattern of Rubens*. Large

rings, set with engraved stones, and huge signet-rings

EUGENE DEVERIA

shone on his fingers, and when he went forth into the streets, he gave the finishing touch to his picturesque eccentricity by draping himself in a full Spanish mantle. Such a fantastic costume would appear strange at the present day, but at that time it was considered quite a natural thing for a man to indulge in. The name of w artist " covered a multitude of sins, and every one, whether painter, poet, or sculptor did as he pleased.

Eugene Deveria's studio was situated in the Rue de 1'Est, in Petitot's house, where lived also Cartellier the sculptor. Deveria shared his studio with Louis Bou- langer, who was finishing his " Mazeppa " while De- veria was working at his "Birth of Henry IV." These two paintings, which were epoch-making, as among the first to carry out the theories of Romanti- cism, were fraternally elaborated under the same roof, but Eugene Deveria lived with his family in the Rue- Not re-Dame-des-Champs, close by Victor Hugo, in whose abode met the society that has since received the name of Caenaculum. At that time painters and poets associated a great deal and formed a mutual admiration society. Although the precept Ut pictura foesis was classical, the new school adopted it, and there is no doubt that every man profited by being familiar with

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both these forms of art. Eugene Deveria, like Louis Boulanger, was a man of letters ; he wrote prettily in verse, and was well fitted to understand the great liter- ary revolution promoted by the author of cc Odes and Ballads." At the tumultuous performances of " Her- nani," to which he led a company of artists and stu- dents, he distinguished himself by the petulant warmth of his applause, and as long as the fight went on he took part in all the battles of the new school. Roman- ticism was at home at the Deverias', as was the saying in those days, and correctly, for there were two of them, Achille and Eugene. Achilla was the elder, and had not the necessities of life compelled him to turn out work incessantly, he would certainly have left a great reputation behind him, for he was no less able than his brother. In the enormous number of his works, which will be greatly sought after by and by, and which comprise lithographs, vignettes, portraits, compositions of all kinds, the drawing is always free, flowing, personal, and marked by a Florentine elegance that denotes much skill. The whole period lives again in them, with its characteristic fashions, ways, affectations, and eccentricities. The Deveria house,

therefore, was one of the foci of Romanticism, and

EUGENE DEVERIA

there were to be met Sainte-Beuve, Alfred de Musset, Fontaney, David d'Angers, Planche, Louis Boulanger, Abel Hugo, Paul Foucher, Petrus Borel, Pacini, Plan- tade, and many another, besides the great Master him- self, who often put in an appearance.

Eugene Deveria was Girodet's pupil, though one would scarcely believe it ; yet Eugene Delacroix had Guerin for master, and who would believe that? The "Birth of Henry IV* no more recalls "Atala and Chactas" than "Dante's Skiff" recalls "Marcus Sextus."

Now that the revolution is ended it is difficult to understand the effect produced by the paintings of these two young masters, the one so brilliant, the other so strong in colour ; the one so bright, the other so harshly sombre, and both contrasting with the paler and paler copies of David's dying school. It is well, there- fore, to replace these works in the surroundings amid which they first appeared, in order to judge of their relative as well as of their absolute value.

Delacroix was the winner; he was more energetic, more persistent, and his genius was the more complex. Eugene Deveria never surpassed his first effort, and his first attempt remained his masterpiece.

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No doubt there are brilliant qualities, pleasant colour- ing, and prodigious facility in his " Puget showing a group to Louis XIV 5 " in the decoration of the chapel of Saint Genevieve in the church of Notre-Dame de Lorette ; in his " Louis-Philippe in the Chamber of Deputies;" in his "Mary Stuart" on the scaffold, listening to the reading of her sentence of death ; in the " Chapel of the Doms "at Avignon ; but it is no longer the splendid solid Venetian colouring and the masterly handling that won fame for the artist and that will make him be remembered among the celebrities of the age. For a man's name may live in a picture as in a book; happy he, therefore, who has made a masterpiece, even if it be unique !

As I mistrusted my youthful impressions which made me think of the " Birth of Henry IV " in its fresh and novel splendour, adorned with all the witchery of colour, after the long dearth of it to which the pseudo- Classical school had condemned all men, I went to the Luxembourg, where it is hung, to look at the painting which, in 1827, struck me as so marvellous. It has perfectly stood the test of time. The patina of years has harmonised its warm, luminous colour, and to-day, as of yore, I admired the composition so cleverly

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grouped in pyramidal form, the relation of the tones, the flowing, abundant matter, the true feeling for deco- rative painting, the lovely female heads, the dwarf carrying a parrot, and the great hound that seems to have escaped out of a painting by Paolo Veronese.

The work is painted in thick impasto, with masterly boldness, certainty, and facility. The figures are well connected together, either by a gesture or by a similar- ity of tone ; the backgrounds are dark or light, as logic demands, behind the personages, and the whole aspect attracts by a unity which is becoming more and more rare. The " Birth of Henry IV " is no mere patch- work of parts studied out separately and then assembled anyhow, but a picture in which everything is connected, and which has been painted with the same colours and the same brush. I believe that when the prescribed time has elapsed, it will hold its place gloriously in the Salon Carre of the Louvre, the Tribuna of the French school and thus preserve from oblivion the once resounding name of Eugene Deveria.

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LOUIS BOULANGER

Born in 1806 Died in 1867

LOUIS BOULANGER was professor in the Dijon Art School, a post occupied for a time by Ziegler. He is another of the valiant privates of the Romanticist army who have fallen far from the field of battle for, alas ! the days of glorious combats are over and who have died al- most unnoticed after having blazed at their begin- nings in the splendour of lightnings and beams. In those old days poets and painters lived familiarly to- gether, and the two arts profited by continual exchange of ideas. At times the poet handled the brush, and the painter the pen. Literature was discussed in the studio, and painting in the study. Louis Boulanger was at one and the same time an artist and a man of letters, and the new school had no more fervent adherent. Every one believed that he was destined to have a brilliant future, and his splendid success at the outset justified the highest hopes,

His first painting, " Mazeppa," had won a great

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triumph. It was a fiery piece of work, full of boldness and dash, splendid in colour, painted in a fashion that was inspired by Rubens and Titian, and that dazzled eyes accustomed to the dulness of the Classical school. He had also produced two large lithographs, no doubt hard to find now, the one representing the " Massacre of Saint Bartholomew " and the other The Witches' Dance," drawn from the famous ballad. The histori- cal scene was quite as strange and fantastic as the legendary one, but in both were to be noted the trans- formation of reality into chimera, and the knowledge of nocturnal terror, which are to be met with in Goya's Caprices" only. "The Death of Bailly," a huge painting, singular in composition and grim in execu- tion, was less suited, on account of the modern subject, to Boulanger's mediaeval talent, and gave rise to violent criticism. It was charged with being hideous and monstrous, and in vain did I reply, like Macbeth's witches, "The horrible is beautiful, the beautiful is horrible 5 ** the picture did not meet with the success of

- Mazeppa." It is true that the artist had bestowed

atrocious faces upon Bailly's executioners.

Deveria, Boulanger, and Delacroix were then equally famous, but Delacroix alone kept on his way to the

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end ; Boulanger, later on, began to doubt whether he had taken the right road, and retraced his steps as if in search of another.

He had one very uncommon defect ; he carried admiration to excess. He admired the masters so pas- sionately that he forgot his own individuality ; he spent long hours in contemplating, copying, and talking of their works. Now it was Rubens, now Veronese, and now Titian ; again, he crossed the Pyrenees and turned to Velasquez and Goya. The works of art rather hid the works of nature from him. But, on the other hand, he exhibited the most marvellous delicacy of tact, feeling, and intelligence when dealing with a picture or a poem, It was worth seeing him enjoy its beauties, and marking his sincere and luminous delight in a thing of beauty.

People have been somewhat unjust towards Bou- langer; he may have admired too much, but he himself has not been sufficiently admired; yet " Petrarca's Triumph," was a magnificent work, and the artist deserved some of the roses cast by the maidens in front of the poet's car. " Rinaldo in Armida's Garden,* 9 Camacho's Wedding Feast," and

the paintings in the dining-room of Mme. Malher, the

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sister of the famous goldsmith were, after all, marvels of grace and colouring.

For a brief moment Boulanger suffered from the disease of style, a trouble that is apt to overtake painters at the critical age and to make them blush for their youthful audacities, but a trip to Spain, when I had the pleasure of spending a few days with him, had brought him back to the right path and to the sound doctrines of Romanticism. " The Court of Miracles " and the " Gipsy Festival," exhibited in the last Salon, showed that he was still the same Louis Boulanger as in 1830. He was besides a charming talker, a delicate poet, and a clever linguist ; he spoke the purest Castilian. When he died I lost one of the pleasantest companions of my younger days.

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THEODORE ROUSSEAU

Born in 1812 Died in 1867

THODORE ROUSSEAU belonged to that splendid generation of 1830 which made its mark upon the future and which will be spoken of as one of the climacteric epochs of the human mind. It was as though tongues of fire had come down from heaven, on one and the same day, upon the heads of the privileged ones. Great was the ardour, great the enthusiasm, great the love of art, and equally fierce the hatred of vulgarity and the contempt for success purchased at the cost of concessions to the lack of taste of the bourgeois. Every one threw him- self into the work with the most intense individuality and the maximum of effort. Every man wrought for all he was worth and cared little if he paid for success with his life, provided he attained his end. Art was being renewed in every part : poetry, the novel, the drama, painting, music gave birth to unnumbered masterpieces. Cabat had discovered nature without travelling far afield ; the Beaujon Gardens, the Mont-

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souris Tavern, the Duck Pond, the Moulin de la Galette had sufficed for his purpose. Flers, Cabat's master, had discovered lovely landscapes in the en- virons of Aumale. Theodore Rousseau, after having drawn inspiration from the hills of Sevres and Meudon, had adventured into Fontainebleau Forest, then almost unknown, and had pitched his tent there, painting the trees, the rocks, the sky, just as if Bertin, Ridault, Watelet, and Michallon had never existed ; painting trees that were not historical, rocks wherein no nymph Echo sought refuge, and skies untraversed by Venus on her car. He reproduced what he saw as it was, with its aspect, its drawing, its colour, the relation between the tones, simply, sincerely, lovingly, quite unaware that he was almost madly audacious, and that he would be taken for a barbarian, a visionary, a madman.

The privilege of truth, when it exhibits itself in its healthy nudity amid our vain appearances and our specious falsehoods, is to be considered indecent, and men straightway seek to drive it back into its well. Having once been permitted to exhibit in the salon, under a misapprehension, no doubt, Rousseau was systematically excluded from it for years. The Insti- tute seemed to dread that this rank revolutionist would

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turn society topsy-turvy. Every time his pictures were refused by the Hanging Committee, the junior press of the day broke out into howls, insults, and diatribes against the jury, which it is impossible to give any idea of. Amazing were the outrageous epithets and metaphors ! I myself displayed towards these unfortunate judges a ferocity that causes me to smile to-day when by chance I come across these virulent pages, the obligatory accompaniment to the opening of every Salon in those days. It may be that the form was exaggerated, but I was right to defend liberty in art. Meanwhile Rousseau, without allowing himself to be discouraged, went on studying nature ; he would surprise her in the morning, ere she was fully clothed and when she thought no one was looking at her; he watched her taking her midday siesta, and especially at even, in the gloaming, when she was about to fall asleep. He did not even leave her after night had fallen, and sought her out in those mysteri- ous hours in the semi-transparency of the darkness. With the help of these studies, he painted bold, strong, original pictures, adding, like every great artist, his own soul to nature's. A few friends alone were acquainted with these works, which perforce long remained in his

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studio, lowly and dusty, their faces to the wall, as if seeking to conceal their shame.

Fortunately there were then young fellows possessed of enthusiasm and admiration, who fell in love with a man's talent and devoted himself to his cause with a sort of fanaticism. They let slip no opportunity of singing the praises of their god, often unknown, of defending him and proclaiming him superior to all others, even going to the length of insulting his opponents, and howling against the injustice of hanging committees and the stupidity of the age. Wherever these peripa- tetic aesthetes met, whether on the Boulevard, in studios, or in drawing-rooms, they enlisted neophytes in their train and led them mysteriously to gaze upon the rejected masterpiece. It was in this way that I first beheld Theodore Rousseau's "The Chestnut-tree Walk." It will easily be understood that this strong, firm, vigorous and fresh painting, filled with the very life of nature and the breath of the heavens, produced a deep impression upon me. The lapse of thirty years has not diminished the remembrance of my surprise, and it was renewed when I again saw the picture, now become famous, at Khalil Bey's. It is a great satisfac- tion to me, in my mature years, not to have to renounce

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any of the things I admired in my youth : what I then thought beautiful is beautiful still, and probably will always be so, for, in the case of many of those I have loved, posterity has already rendered its judgment. If life has not fulfilled all the promises it held out, art at least, let me do it the justice to say so, has never deceived me. Not one of the gods I worshipped has turned out to be a false god, and I may go on burning before them the incense they deserve. But alas ! it is too often upon the fire of a funeral pyre that I have to cast my incense.

A landscape painter's pictures do not bear, like those of an historical painter, distinctive names. Landscape, as Rousseau conceived it, includes neither anecdotes nor historical facts; figures appear in it merely as pleasant spots of colour, and have no greater importance than they really have in nature itself, in which man disappears so swiftly. Unless in the case of some peculiarity in the scene chosen, the best title for a landscape is, after all, u Landscape " itself, and for that reason I am unable to mention Theodore Rousseau's chief works, though it was easy to do so in the case of Ingres. But posterity will find names for them, as it has

done for the landscapes of Ruysdael and Hobbema*

THEDORE ROUSSEAU

Unlike most painters, who adopt a certain manner soon as easily recognisable as a man's handwriting, Rousseau is exceedingly varied. He employs every means of getting at the truth: sometimes he uses im- pasto, sometimes he rubs thinly; now he works with as much dash as if he were making a rapid sketch, now he finishes his work minutely ; at one moment he chooses a scene that he presents at a certain hour, under an almost fantastic aspect, such as nature's assiduous ob- servers often note; at another he will reproduce in simplest fashion a flat piece of country traversed by a farm road and diversified with a few poplars ; or else he plunges into his favourite forest and takes an oak, of which he makes a portrait just as if it were that of an emperor or a god or a hero. Majestic and mighty still is that veteran of the forest, that monarch of the grove, worthy of being sung by Laprade, around whom haye fallen the ages like the yellow leaves of autumn ! At Dodona it would have uttered sacred oracles ; in the Druidical wood it would have furnished a golden-sickle- bearing Velleda with mistletoe. The intense colouring of this masterpiece has already acquired the polish of agate, as experts and connoisseurs put it, and hereafter

will change no more than would the colouring of a mosaic.

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Although deeply original and drawing his inspiration directly from nature, Theodore Rousseau belonged to one of the families in art j he was distantly related to Gainsborough, Constable, and especially to that painter, little known on the Continent, whom the English call Old Crome. Rousseau drew well and carefully, but it is chiefly upon his colour that his fame will rest. As an artist grows old, he is apt to suffer from the disease called style, and to judge his own youthful work severely; but Rousseau, thanks to his incessant familiarity with nature, and to his own robust temperament, hap- pily passed through that regrettable crisis, remained true to himself, and admired, without seeking to imitate them, the learned landscapes of Poussin. Rousseau may be said to be the Delacroix of landscape painting, there being between them one of those secret analogies that are felt though they cannot well be expressed.

I must be permitted here to recall a personal recol- lection. After having long suffered from persecution, the tc Great Ever Refused," as he was called, had actually become a member of the Hanging Committee, and even chairman of that body, the transformation having been rendered possible by more equitable and

more liberal conditions in the judging. The former

THEODORE ROUSSEAU

culprit, the convict of other days, had in his turn taken his seat on the judges' bench. I need not say what religious care, what sustained attention, what compre- hensive indulgence marked his discharge of these delicate functions, the difficulty of which one can appre- ciate only after having performed them ; and when some queer, extraordinary work, abnormal in conception or execution, was submitted to us, Rousseau, before the verdict of condemnation was pronounced, would say to those of the veterans of 1830 who, like himself, had now become members of the committee : " Let us take care, gentlemen ; it may be that we are now only Romanticist fossils, Classicists of a sort."

At one of these meetings, the last one, we came out together. The recluse landscape-painter was a remark- able conversationalist, who spoke well on every subject and especially upon his own art. His old inextin- guishable ardour rendered him insensible to fatigue, and after a lifetime of work that broke down the youngest, he was still bright, strong, ready to discuss theories, paradoxes, and aesthetics. We were crossing slowly the gardens in which Ledoyen has installed his kitchen, in an effective Pompeian villa, of which we caught a glimpse illumined by a sunbeam through clumps of

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verdure, A tree that sprang boldly into the air, its column-like bole half hidden by ivy, struck me and I drew the great artist's attention to it. I thought the tree had an elegance of its own, a worldly and fashion- able elegance, so to speak ; for there are, I said, wild trees, peasant trees, bourgeois trees and dandy trees, this one belonging to the latter class. It might be con- sidered an aristocrat of vegetation, for it appeared to have acquired the great air by watching the luxurious great world, the splendid carriages, the spirited horses, and the gorgeous costumes passing along under its shade. Trees in royal or lordly parks seem to bear coats of arms. No doubt wild nature is preferable, but there is a certain charm in cultivated nature. Why did land- scape-painters never depict a park, a garden, a villa, so pleasant in its elegance even though somewhat formal ?

Whereunto Theodore Rousseau replied, " It is very difficult to do so."

And on we went, continuing our conversation, through the Cours-la-Reine, the Champs-Elysces and the Tuileries, and we saw various groups of trees most happily arranged and of a beauty of form that could not have been surpassed in a virgin forest, but ever with an

aristocratic stamp that was easily recognisable. The

THEODORE ROUSSEAU

artist's big eyes had lighted up, and already the picture to be painted was taking shape in his brain, while with uplifted finger, following the outlines, he was sketching in the main lines. Two chestnut trees that rise behind the Diana the Huntress, appeared to him suitable to form the central group or, as he called it, the key of the composition. He was full of the idea, and wished to paint the city trees, now that he had so well painted the forest trees. When we parted, he shook hands abruptly and left me saying, " I intend to paint that picture."

But he did not paint it. Man makes plans without taking death into his reckoning, and no one may be sure that he will finish the task he has begun. I did not again see Rousseau ; yet who could have believed that the delightful walk of that day, filled with talk, study of nature, and friendly discussion of art, was to be the last we should have on earth ? The day was lovely, and all around us smiled ; the broad-shouldered painter, with his ruddy, strong face, his beard scarce streaked with a few gray hairs, seemed destined to live many long days. We felt no sad presentiment, nothing that presaged an eternal separation. Painful and sad it is to think that one parts never, perhaps, to meet again !

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Now Theodore Rousseau rests in Fontainebleau, in the same graveyard where we had already gone to bury Decamps, away through the forest, on a spring morn- ing that seemed to laugh at human grief. He desired to be laid there, near the Barbison cottage, covered with flowers and climbing plants, in which he took so much delight, and which resembled Gainsborough's cottage. May Nature grant sound sleep to her favour- ite painter, and may his beloved forest rain down upon him grateful shade and sunshine !

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FROMENT MEURICE

Born in 1802 Died in 1855

FROMENT MEURICE, the brother of the distinguished poet, dramatist, and journalist, Paul Meurice, was connected with the great Romanticist movement that, about the year 1830, re- newed art in France, and gave birth to a legion of poets and artists, as the Renaissance had already done in the sixteenth century. Previous to that time gold- smith-work, like tragic verse, was cold, shiny, polished, and commonplace; it reproduced the old pseudo- classical forms, and the centrepieces it turned out might have figured on AstreVs table for the guests to eat lines by Crebillon out of; gems were set in flat settings or symmetrical frets that any work- man could manage; silver plate affected English pat- terns need I say more ? The revolution begun by Wagner, a great artist belonging to the race of the Maso Finiguerras, the Benvenuto Cellinis, the Ghiubettis, the Aldegravers, the Albert Diirers, was

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continued by Froment Meurice who caused it to triumph.

In that brilliant group of poets, painters, sculptors, and musicians, Froment Meurice, and it is a great honour, will be the goldsmith. He has chased the thoughts that the strong generation sang, painted, carved, or modelled. He has added to the trophy of nineteenth-century art a wreath formed of brilliant golden leaves, with flowers of imperishable diamonds, In one of his charming smaller odes Victor Hugo has called him the sculptor of gems, while Balzac, the Dante of "The Human Comedy," never fails to clasp on the arm of his courtesans, or of his high-born ladies, of his Duchesses of Maufrigneuse, or of his Aurelie Shontzes, a bracelet, the work of Froment Meurice. Every time that poets, novelists, or critics have to speak of refined luxury, of art that is at once rare and delicate, it is his name that recurs in their pages. If perchance fortune knocks at the door of an artist who has hitherto had only the cup of imagination to drink out of, he forthwith goes to order champagne icing-pails of the goldsmith who so readily enters into every fancy.

Froment Meurice did not execute much of the work himself, although he handled the boaster, the chisel,

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and the hammer most skilfully. He invented, sought new designs, drew, discovered admirable combinations; he was particularly successful as manager of his work- shop, and in inspiring his workmen. He has marked every piece of his work with his thought, if not with his hand. Like the leader of an orchestra, he inspired and led a whole company of sculptors, draughtsmen, ornament workers, engravers, enamellers, and jewellers; for the master goldsmith cannot afford the time, nowa- days, to put on a working-apron and to compel the metal to assume diverse forms. Pradier, David, Feu- cheres, Cavelier, Preault, Schoenwerk, Pascal, Rouil- laud have each and all been translated by Froment Meurice into gold, silver, and oxidised iron. He has reproduced their statues on breast-pins, cane-handles, candelabra, and vase-stands, enwreathing them with garlands of enamels, flowers, and gems, giving Truth a diamond for mirror, bestowing wings of sapphire upon angels, and clusters of rubies for grapes upon Erigone. And he never sought to appropriate any one's fame, well aware as he was that his own was great enough, and when he exhibited, he always frankly stated the names of his collaborators, whether artists or

artisans.

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It would take long to recapitulate the numerous works which won for Froment Meurice the reputation he has left behind him: centrepieces, toilet-sets, ewers, cas- kets, jewel-cases, Byzantine reliquaries, monstrances, chalices, cups, shields, seals, rings, bracelets, necklaces, snuff-boxes. He managed to vary indefinitely these fanciful creations of the world of ornament in which a female figure springs from the calyx of a flower, a monster ends in foliage, a salamander writhes in flames formed of rubies, a lizard disappears in grass made of emeralds, and arabesques delight in involved interlacings and complications; under the silver Nereids with hair of green gold, he has caused to swell waves of mother- of-pearl, pearls, and coral; he has placed under the feet of terrestrial nymphs a ground of diamonds, topazes, and fine gems ; he has mingled metal vine- leaves with ivory grape-gatherers; set miniature har- vesters in snuff-boxes, and turned his shop into a den as splendid as Aladdin's grotto, the Treasury of the Caliph Haroun al Raschid, Abul Kasim's well, or the Grune Gewolbe at Dresden. The blood-stained bou- quet of diamonds that Cardillac won back at the dagger's point was reset by Froment Meurice, as it had erst- while been, as brilliant, as light, and as sparkling with

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fascinating rays, and, less cruel than Louis XIV's cruel jeweller, he did not assassinate its fortunate owner.

A goldsmith works for emperors, popes, kings, princes, and the rich on earth only ; yet Froment Meurice, who counted among his customers Pius IX, Emperor Nicholas, Queen Marie-Amelie, Queen Victoria, the Duchess of Parma, the Duchess of Orleans, the Duke de Montpensier, the Count of Paris, Emperor Napoleon III, Prince Napoleon, Prince Demidoff, the Duke de Luynes, the Duke de Noailles, Rothschild, Veron, and Mile. Rachel, had thought of putting the lovely art of jewellery within the reach of all women. He wished that every beauty, even though not rich, and without having to degrade herself, should be able to own ear-rings, a brooch, and a bracelet in the most exquisite taste, the workmanship of which should be more precious than the gold of which they were made, and with this in view he studied the great modern discovery galvanoplastics, the marvellous process by means of which the goldsmith is replaced by electricity, and the finest models can be reproduced in endless numbers at a very low cost.

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BARYE

THE Romanticist revolution which was pre- pared under the Restoration and which broke out in 1830, made itself felt less in sculpture than in the other arts. The painters fol- lowed the poets, but statuary remained almost impass- ible in its marmorean serenity. The Greeks seem to have once and for all fixed its laws, the conditions under which it is produced, and the ideal it must seek to attain. It is not too much to say that that noble, that pure art still lives to-day upon the tradition of antiquity, and that it degenerates whenever it departs from it. Yet here also the regenerating movement made itself felt; a few bold spirits believed that it was possible to introduce more naturalness in the old con- ventional mould, even if it were to crack in conse- quence. David d' Angers, Auguste Preault, Antonin Moine, Maindron, Triqueti, Mile. Fauveau, and Barye were, among sculptors, the representatives of the new movement in favour of originality and freedom. The opposition they met with was even fiercer than that

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with which poets and painters had to contend, for statuary, accustomed to and needing the nude, and borrowing almost all its subjects from the lives of heroes, from mythology and allegory, has forcibly to remain classical and pagan. It loves to represent form under the guise of Truth rising out of its well, and in the way of clothing it is unwilling to admit anything more than drapery, which does not fetter nudity. In complex and troubled times like our own, this setting aside of passion, of the accidental, of colour, this immovable calm readily lead to coldness and weari- ness. Composition in statuary is confined to eu- rhythmy in attitudes, to the balancing of lines, to the equipoise of contours, and the seeking after beauty precludes any characteristic violence. As it travels along this path, in a civilisation unfavourable to it, the antique speedily degenerates into the classical, the classical into the academic, and the academic into mere inferior imitation. All that is then obtained is a series of casts in which the original forms are more and more softened away.

In this struggle of new ideas on one side and of routine on the other, Barye proved to be one of the most courageous, most resolute, and most persevering

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combatants. Born in 1796, he entered art through the gate of trade. When he was thirteen years old, he was apprenticed to Fourier, an engraver on steel, whose specialty was the cutting of dies for military badges. In 1812, he was taken as a conscript and served for a time in the surveying branch of the Engineers. Some plans in relief drawn by him at that period are even now preserved. After 1814 he re- sumed his former occupation, but at the same time he drew, modelled, and studied. His masters were Bosio and Gros, for Barye's talent was of that complex nature that is not confined to one form of art. He handles the painter's brush as skilfully as the sculptor's boaster, and I have seen water-colours by him that were remarkable for their strength and character. He thus prepared himself for the great competitive ex- amination at the cole des Beaux-Arts in the branches of engraving and statuary. Considering the talent he has shown since that time, and which no one disputes, it might be supposed that he triumphed easily; but either his talent was still in germ only, or the judges were not clever enough to perceive it, for he obtained no more than honourable mention in engraving and two second prizes in sculpture. He did not continue

BARYE

his fruitless attempts, and, abandoning the school, he set about following his own inspiration, and it is quite possible that his failure was, so far as his individuality was concerned, a fortunate thing for him.

Forced to work for his living, he had to accept trade orders, which he carried out in a new manner that transformed them into artistic works. Very speedily he acquired unrivalled skill in the production of bronzes, the models of which he invented himself and which he cast in are perdue^ by the old Florentine process. He was thoroughly familiar with every de- tail of the mixing, the casting, the chasing, the putting on of a patina, and the great artist in him was served by the practical skill of the expert workman that he was also. I lay stress upon this fact, because most contemporary sculptors, taking thought for the ideal part of their art only, leave their subject, after they have modelled it in clay or wax, to be executed by their assistants, who cannot possibly give that final touch which is the very feeling of the artist himself. What these statues, mathematical reproductions of their models, lack is the last surfacing, the bloom of the epiderm, the palpitation of life, which is less im- portant perhaps in marble than in bronze, the ductile

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metal reproducing even the faint marks made by the finger on the clay.

Barye was long considered to be simply an animal sculptor, so quick are we in France to shut an artist up within a specialty, which it delights us to restrict more and more. Yet he had first made his appearance, at the Salon of 1827, as the sculptor of busts that proved he could portray a man as well as a lion. Excluded from the Salon of 1836, at the same time as Eugene Delacroix, Theodore Rousseau, Corot, Preault, Main- dron and many another, by a committee then com- posed exclusively of members of the Institute hostile to the new ideas, he withdrew to his tent, as the saying is, not discouraged, but simply to avoid exposing him- self to renewed affronts. A character like Barye, so robust, energetic, and patient, is not easily discouraged. Prevented from enjoying the benefits of exhibitions and of official orders, he brought out a great number of bronzes, both large and small, that added to his already great reputation, which had rapidly spread from the ranks of artists, who are first to appreciate anything. Barye did not, it is true, need to swell his fame by the interest that attaches to the victim of an unjust exclusion, but the martyr's crown, which he had not sought, did

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not hurt him, and all the more did the public admire the manly, courageous artist who, in the silence and solitude of his studio, and lacking all government encouragement, wrought and multiplied works stamped with the seal of a strong originality.

Barye did not treat animals merely as a naturalist might do it ; he was not satisfied with representing them with their characteristic traits and in their usual attitudes ; he brought out their beauty and their peculi- arities, seeking main lines, broad effects, splendid ports, proud outlines,' well-balanced poses, just as if he were working at human portraits. Let me hasten to add that his thorough study of osteology, of the muscular system, of the nature of the coats and hides, and his prolonged observations of the living animals, his famil- iar acquaintance with their manners, their characters, and their ways, enabled him to conciliate nature and the ideal.

Let no one imagine that he produced academic lions and conventional tigers ; it is easy to see the contrary by casting a glance at the great carved poodles, placed upon pedestals at the corners of the terraces and of the steps in public gardens. They wear marble periwigs in the fashion of the days of Louis XIV, the

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curls of which, neatly smoothed, fall down their backs. Their debonair faces, almost human in expression, resemble the make-up of heavy fathers in the old style comedies; their flaccid bodies, rounded, bone- less, nerveless, and filled with bran, one would say, are devoid of suppleness and vigour, while their raised paws rest upon a ball with not very lion-like gesture.

Tremendous, therefore, was the sensation produced by the ct Lion and Serpent," which is perhaps Barye's masterpiece. At the sight of this formidable and superb animal, with its wild, bristling mane, anger and disgust curling back its lips, its brazen claws holding firm the hideous reptile writhing in powerless rage, all the wretched marble lions stuck their tails between their legs and nearly let go the ball that aids them to keep up appearances. Barye's was a genuine lion from the Atlas, superbly tawny, with unconquered muscles, and no trace of the ' academic smile in his fierce grin. Transported from the desert to the Tuil cries, it caused fear like a real lion, and one would have preferred to see it in a cage, had not the green patina on the bronze reassured one and shown that it

lived only the formidable life of art. The " Lion at _

BARYE

rest," intended as a companion piece, recalls by the solemn tranquillity of its attitude and the sweep of the lines, the giant marble lions of Piraeus, that were in- tended to draw Cybele's car, and which Morosini, the Peloponnesian, caused to be transported to Venice, where they now guard the gates of the Arsenal.

No less marked was the success of the "Tiger devouring a Crocodile." How strong, how grim is that contracted, arched back, quivering with satisfied greed, the paws, with prominent angles, the protruding hips, the heaving flanks, the lashing tail ! How pite- ously the poor scaly monster writhes with pain in the grasp of those claws sharp as dagger-points ! Never was the combat between things in nature, never was the fatality of destruction rendered more profoundly and more powerfully.

The mere mention of " Bears fighting," the " Bear in its Trough," a cc Horse struck down by a Lion," a "Dead Gazelle," an "Asiatic Elephant," a "Jaguar devouring a Hare," suffices to remind every one of those groups, so full of life and of dash and so admi- rably wrought out. At the very least one knows the centrepiece made to the order of the Duke of Orleans, from the designs of Chenevard, comprising hunts in

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nine different parts of the world, an admirable theme that enabled Barye to mingle together, with picturesque fury, men, lions, tigers, and elephants.

During the long years of his exclusion from the Salon, Barye produced the " Three Graces," " Angel- ica and Medora," " Theseus fighting the Minotaur," and a number of equestrian statuettes that require only to be enlarged to look as well on a public square as the statues of Gattamelata and General Colleoni, for, I do not hesitate to repeat it, Barye is not only an admi- rable sculptor of animals, he is a sculptor in the fullest meaning of the word, of the highest taste and the noblest style. This was well seen in 1850, when he returned to the Salon, a triumphal return, and when he took, his place with the assent of all men, the front rank in which he had so long deserved to be. The u Centaur tamed by one of the Lapithae " gave proof that the Romanticist whom the committee had proscribed was the modern sculptor who came nearest to Phidias and to Greek sculpture. The man, with his simple, robust form, ideally handsome, and true to nature, might have figured on the Parthenon pediment, by the side of the Ilissus, while the Centaur might have played his part in the cavalcades on the metopes.

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People were amazed that an artist who modelled ani- mals so well should prove so successful in turning out men and heroes, just as though form were not one and the same, in spite of its apparent diversity, and could possibly refuse to yield its secrets to so keen-sighted an observer as Barye.

The sculptor of lions recently executed four groups in the round for the Louvre pavilions: " Peace,'* "War," "Force protecting Work," and "Order repressing the Wicked.'* The figures in these groups are happily combined with animals that bring out the allegorical meaning, and are marked by the quiet lines and the monumental serenity that best suit sculpture in conjunction with architecture.

Barye, who is at this time in the full enjoyment of a green old age, has a calm, strong, gentle face, on which his hard struggles have left no trace of bitter- ness, but on which it is easy to make out, behind the gentleness, a resolute will that nothing can discourage, and the modest consciousness of the man of talent who has long ago learned to dispense with praise, while the strong frame promises to be equal to many more years of work.

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HIPPOLYTE MONPOU

Born in 1804 Died in 1841

IF there be a composer to whom poets ought to be grateful, it is unquestionably Hippolyte Monpou. Far from preferring meaningless words, he bravely selected the finest verse, the most complex and the most difficult rhythms. Nothing dismayed him, not even fitful metres, echoing rimes, or the mediaeval counter-echoes of u Odes and Ballads." He managed to draw from all these things unexpected melodies and strange effects, blamed by some, applauded by others. Eccentric as he was he had become popular, thanks to " The Andalusian," My good Ship," and The Madman of Toledo." He was a Romanticist and lit- erary composer ; brought up in Choron's school, he had studied attentively the compositions of the great masters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and thus contracted a certain taste for the archaic, a figured style in strong contrast with modern habits. This also accounted for the lack of symmetry in his rhythm, for his overflows and his suspensions of the caesura, so that,

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better than any one else, he was fitted to set to music the verses of the innovators whom the reading of the ancients and of Ronsard had made enemies of well turned periods.

Hippolyte Monpou, like the poets whose lines he translated, was considered by the middle class a crazy loon, a madman who ought to have been muzzled in- stead of being permitted to sing as he pleased. Every time he sat down to the piano, his eyes blazing, his mustache bristling, a circle of apprehensive people formed respectfully around him; no sooner had he sung the first few lines of " The Andalusian Maid " than the mothers posted their daughters off to bed and plunged their noses, coloured with the flush of modest shame, into their nosegays. The music caused as much terror as the words, but little by little people got used to it ; only, " golden skin " was substituted for " golden breasts," and " She is the mistress I have won " for "She is my mistress, my lioness," which struck hearers, in those days, as too dreadfully bestial and monstrous.

Innumerable songs, each lovelier than its predecessor, and several of which have become popular, spread the author's reputation and enabled him at kst to reach the

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stage, the great desire of his heart. " The Lute-maker of Vienna," "The Two Queens," Piquillo " the pretty libretto of which was the joint work of Alexan- dre Dumas and Gerard de Nerval " The Planter," and " Chaste Suzannah " followed in rapid succession, and death found Monpou working at the unfinished score of " Lambert Simnel." This work, which gives evidence of great progress on the composer's part, was completed by Adolphe Adam with delicacy and discre- tion, and with artistic conscientiousness and piety that do credit to his heart and his skill alike. It was per- formed at the Opera-Comique, where it won a great and well deserved success.

I am not of those who wait until after a man's death to discover that he was possessed of genius ; I do not care overmuch for posthumous admiration, and what I am saying of Monpou now that he is but dust, I would have said of him when he walked on the Boulevard, smoking his cigar and turning some air over in his mind. " Lambert Simnel " contains pas- sages that might figure in the works of any one of the masters, and which, in order to be proclaimed admirable, need only to be a score of years older and signed with a foreign name. It is of little impor-

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tance that the matter of Monpou's operas was not very novel.

He was very fond of ballads, and hunted them out in the works of every poet of his day. He used up the whole of Alfred de Musset, and I can still re- member hearing Monpou sing "Have you seen in Barcelona ," with the greatest spirit, and with poses and gestures like those of Hoffmann's fantastic musi- cians. Kreisler would have seemed cold by compari- son with him. He sought after originality, and often came upon it. Never was a composer more passion- ately, more enthusiastically in love with his art ; never did any one spare himself less. When he was at the piano and felt that he had been understood and appre- ciated, he would say, "What do you think of this one ? " And he would go on, to our great delight, until the candles had burned down to their sockets.

He was as great believer as the rest of us in sere- nades, alcaldes, mantillas, guitars, and castanets, in all that conventional Italy and no less conventional Spain made fashionable by the author of " Don Paez," tc Por- tia," and " The Marquesa d'Amaegui." He set these rollicking, hare-brained couplets, cheeky as pages, to mad, sparkling music, full of strange cries and pro-

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longed notes after the Andalusian manner that fairly delighted us. Victor Hugo's thoroughly Spanish "guitarra," " Gastibelza, the man with the rifle," had inspired Monpou with a wild, plaintive air, of the strangest character, that long remained popular, and that no Romanticist, if there be any Romanticists left, can possibly have forgotten. The poets were very fond of him, for he respected their words and did not dis- turb the economy of their carefully wrought stanzas. Monpou loved difficult rhythms, and maintained that new motives were suggested by little-used breaks. In a word, he was one of us, and, as it were, the Berlioz of song.

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HECTOR BERLIOZ

Born In 1803 Died in 1870

HARD, troubled, and adverse was his fate. As Theophile de Viau, the poet, says of him- self, he was born ct under a stormy star." His craft was constantly swept by the billows and the winds, half smothered in foam, struck by lightning, driven from its haven and borne back into the offing as it was on the point of making port. But it was directed by a resolute will, that the very destruction of the universe could not have shaken, and that, in spite of sails torn to ribbons, masts carried away, and a hull leaking in every seam, steadily kept on its way to the realisation of its ideal.

No man ever was so absolutely devoted to art or so wholly sacrificed his life to it. In hours of uncer- tainty, of doubt, of concession to the world, of self- despair, of inclination to attain success by different means, Hector Berlioz never for an instant listened to the base tempter that, in moments of discouragement, bends over the artist's chair and whispers prudent

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advice in his ear. His faith remained unimpaired, and even in his darkest hours, maugre indifference, raillery, and poverty, never once did it occur to him to win popularity by some commonplace melody, by some vulgar strain set to the rhythm of a country-dance. Notwithstanding all difficulties, he clung faithfully to his conception of beauty. It may be questioned whether he was a great genius, for differences of opin- ion are universal, but no one can deny that he was a man of great character.

In the Renaissance of 1830, he represents the Romanticist ideal in music, that is, the breaking of the old moulds, the substitution of new forms for the old invariable squared rhythms, the complex and elaborate richness of orchestration, faithfulness to local colour, unexpected effects of sonority, tumultuous and Shake- spearian depth of passion, amorous or melancholy reveries, undefined and mysterious feelings which speech cannot express, and that something beyond all these things, which words cannot render and that notes help one to understand.

Hector Berlioz attempted to do in music what the poets of that day were trying to do in verse, and he did it with an energy, an audacity, and an amount of

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originality that provoked more astonishment than admiration. The musical education of the French was far from having reached the point to which it has attained nowadays. Habeneck, who was devoted to high art, ventured from time to time upon one or two of the least unintelligible of Beethoven's symphonies, which were considered barbaric, uncivilised, mad, and unfit to be performed, although they were performed, while the Classicists of the day maintained that these symphonies were no more music than Victor Hugo's verse was poetry or Delacroix's paintings were paint- ing. In order to render Weber's " Der Freyschutz " acceptable, Castil-Blaze was obliged to disguise it under the title of cc Robin Hood " and to add a good deal of his own to it. Rossini himself, with his luminous and smiling facility, passed in the opinion of many for a musical law-breaker, a dangerous innovator who was corrupting the noble simplicity of the masters of his art. He was reproached with noisy orchestration, with using the brasses to make a din, with indulging in thunderous crescendos. So it can easily be under- stood that in such an environment Berlioz did not meet with much encouragement. Happily, he was of the breed of men who can dispense with suc-

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cess ; he had been drawn to his art by an irresistible vocation.

The son of a physician, and intended to be a phy- sician himself, he abandoned the Medical School for the Conservatoire, where he studied under Reicha and Lesueur, His allowance was cut off, and he was com- pelled to enter the chorus at the Theatre des Nou- veautes, with a salary of fifty francs a month, which sufficed to provide for the material needs of a life wholly devoted to art.

His horror of vulgar formulae, his feeling for de- scription, his intelligence of nature, and his desire to make his art express what it had not yet expressed, made Hector Berlioz a true Romanticist, and as such he took his part in the great battle, in which he fought with incredible resolution.

He had already written a mass for four voices, with choruses and orchestral accompaniment, an overture to " Waverley," and the u Fantastic Symphony," the latter a sort of musical autobiography in which the voices and whispers of the orchestra tell of the artist's dreams, loves, sorrows, despairs, nightmares, and mad nervous terrors. It was greatly admired and applauded by the Romanticist phalanx, and produced at that time

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a sensation comparable to that caused by the perform- ance of the first compositions by Richard Wagner. The performance of " Tannhauser " at the Opera is a perfect illustration of the kind of success that awaits any new work in our country. Violent discussions were carried on by both parties, and politeness often suffered, for in matters of art men become even more excited than in politics. Although Berlioz was gener- ally considered as being out of his mind, he neverthe- less inspired the terror caused by every individual known to be possessed of secret power. Amid his eccentrici- ties, his obscurities, his exaggerations, there was plainly to be seen a resolute and unbending energy 5 even then he had the steadfastness of primitive strength, and he resembled that pantheistic character in the second part of " Faust " whom Goethe calls " Oreas, a rock by nature/'

The public very generally believes that Romanti- cists, whether poets, painters, or composers, have thrown off the yoke of rules either because they have never learned these rules or because they are so unskilful that they feel fettered by them. Nothing can be more erroneous. The innovators were one and all deeply versed in the technique of their respcc-

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tive arts. A man must know much before he can reform. Every one of the so-called wild-haired, uncurbed artists who, so it was alleged, wrote only under the influence of delirium, were on the con- trary consummate contrapuntists, each one in his own sphere, and perfectly capable of ending a fugue in the most regular fashion. The rigorous care for form and colour, the difficulties of composition, and the novelty of details, which were self-imposed, called for infinitely greater work than submission to the recog- nised old rules, that were, besides, so often ignored.

Thus Hector Berlioz' Romanticism did not prevent his winning the prize for musical composition, and carrying off the ct grand prix de Rome " with his can- tata tc Sardanapalus," a splendid subject, from which Byron had drawn a poem and Delacroix a painting. This was in 1830, and Berlioz composed, in honour of the men who fell during the revolution in July, a funeral and triumphal march of the noblest character. I can still remember, with a thrill of enthusiasm, the passage describing the entrance of the heroes' souls into heaven, to the sound of loud bursts of music in which the voices of the angels were heard above the already distant acclaim of men.

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He then left for Italy, having already, though still but a student, acquired the renown of a master. He was not greatly taken with Italian music, with its little re- gard for harmony and its easy melodies, which take no account of the words or of the situation, and which, agreeable in themselves, apart from their meaningless- ness, are embroidered upon a uniform background, like the delicate arabesques on the walls of Pompeii. The grandeur and beauty of Italy, however, did strongly influence him, and left upon his mind a lasting im- pression of picturesqueness, though the works he com- posed during his stay in Rome show that his mind was elsewhere. In the Villa Medici, under the spreading pines of the Pamphili or Borghese gardens, or in the solitary Campus, it was of Shakespeare, of Goethe, of Walter Scott that he thought, and there he composed his "Return to Life,'* his "Fisherman's Ballad," the Ghost scene in u Hamlet," and the overtures to " King Lear "and" Rob Roy/'

No trace of his stay in Italy is to be found in the works he composed at this time; he preferred Ger- many, to which he was unable to go. At the perform- ances of the English actors, which, like the passionate admirer of Shakespeare that he was, he attended con-

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stantly, by dint of seeing her fill the parts of Ophelia, Cordelia, Portia, and other charming heroines so tender and romantic, he fell in love with Miss Smithson, an actress of great talent and beauty, whom he married, and whose illness it was, on his return from Rome, that prevented his visiting the land of Bach, Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven. Heinrich Heine relates that Berlioz, in the days of his love affair, desiring to see the lady of his dreams nearer, and also, it may be, be- cause he had not the money to pay for an orchestra stall night after night, had taken an engagement as kettle-drummer in the orchestra, and frantically pum- melled his kettle-drums, just as Freiligrath's negro king used to beat his drum ; and this especially when the beloved actress made her tragedy-queen entrances.

The symphony " Harold," which he composed at about this time, was received more favourably than has been the case with his later works. The Pilgrims* March in it was encored and obtained a success like that of the Pilgrims' Chorus in " Tannhauser " at the present day. It should not be inferred from this that this part was superior to the rest of the work, which contains beauties of the first rank, but the particular

rhythm of a march enables those who need to have the

HECTOR BERLIOZ

lines of a poem scanned for them, and the time of a score clearly marked, to appreciate more easily the musical thought.

While Berlioz had many detractors and many who refused to acknowledge his talent, he had one partisan whose competency in matters musical none could deny : Paganini, the violin fiend, the violin angel, who was ac- cused of having shut up the soul of one of his mistresses in the sonorous box of his instrument. That inimitable and fantastic artist, who made one believe in the power of incantations, was a passionate admirer of Berlioz, and he, the miser, of whom tales were told that made Harpagon seem prodigal, becoming as generous as an Oriental potentate, sent Berlioz twenty thousand francs by way of acknowledgment of the noble pleasure he had derived from that work.

I cannot, of course, follow Berlioz' musical career composition by composition in these few pages. He

tried the stage, and his " Benvenuto Cellini " was per-

formed at the Opera. The libretto was by Emile

Deschamps and Auguste Barbier \ the delicately wrought music was full of the loveliest bits and of the most original motives, but it had been decreed that Berlioz

was not melodious; and in spite of the lovely air, _

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" Melancholy," so well sung by Mme. Stoltz, who took the part of Ascanio; the beautiful song of the gold chasers :

" The metals be subterranean blooms That ope but on the brows of queens, Of popes, and eke of emperors ; "

of the suave and broad andante of Cellini:

" Would that upon the wildest hills A simple shepherd lad were I ! w

and the plaintively graceful ballad:

" Happy all the sailors be As they roam upon the sea ; "

in spite of the lively tumult of the Carnival that rang through the opera, the work had but three or four per- formances. Nowadays, when so many insignificant, old-fashioned works, so desperately commonplace in conception and execution, are being revived, it would be a good deal better to revive that bold, original, thor- oughly novel work, which would be welcomed at present, and which might have the luck to win posthu- mous renown.

Berlioz was not discouraged, but as he felt that success _

HECTOR BERLIOZ

on the operatic stage must be paid for by concessions repugnant to his lofty nature, he confined himself to dramatic symphonies, such as " The Damnation of Faust " and " Romeo and Juliet," which he had per- formed at his own expense on that ideal stage where neither scenery nor costumes are needed, and on which the poet's fancy reigns supreme. " The Damnation of Faust " contains precisely what is lacking in Gounod's " Faust," in other respects a remarkable work ; namely, sinister and mysterious depths, a darkness wherein glimmers faintly the star of -the microcosm, the utter powerlessness of human knowledge in presence of the unknown, the diabolical irony of negation, and the weariness of the spirit springing towards matter. Un- questionably Faust, as Goethe conceived it, has never been better understood. I have the pleasantest remem- brance of the garden scene, and the Infernal March that gallops along upon a Hungarian theme won an immense success. Then how many beautiful and in- sufficiently appreciated passages there are in u Romeo and Juliet"! the ball in the house of Capulet, Queen Mab's scherzo and serenade, in which the com- poser rivals the poetry, the lightness, and the grace of the witty Mercutio, whom Shakespeare could not carry

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to the end of the play, and whom he causes to be slain by Paris after a few brilliant scenes.

Berlioz was not only a composer of the first order, he was also a writer of uncommon sense, wit, and humour. For a long time he was the musical critic of the yournal des D'ebats^ in which he maintained his views, attacked everything that struck him as being vulgar, and sang the praises of his gods, Gluck and Beethoven, in honour of whom he erected white marble altars as to immortals. But he never spoke of his articles, that attracted so much attention, save with secret bitterness. It is as grievous to a composer to put down his lyre for the pen as for the poet to lay aside poetry for prose for the sake of a livelihood, for the painter to make lithographs bring him in what his pictures should do. That is a woe we each of us have known, and it is by no means the least endurable. Every hour given up to such tasks is perchance an hour of immortality of which one robs one's self, and who can say that time thus lost will ever be recovered ? Besides, when incessant labour shall have earned some leisure for one towards the end of one's days, will one have the strength then to carry out the conceptions

evolved in youth ? Will it be possible ever again to

HECTOR BERLIOZ

revive the vanished flame, to recompose the vision that forgetfulness has borne away ?

These be the sorrows of the great-hearted artist, and this was the source of the tragic melancholy, the Pro- methean melancholy from which Berlioz suffered. He felt that he was a Titan capable of scaling high heaven and of standing face to face with Jupiter ; yet he was condemned to remain nailed with diamond nails, by Force and Power, to the cross on Caucasus, like the hero of ^Eschylus, while the vulture gnawed at his heart. Nor did he even have the consolation of seeing the two thousand Oceanids, borne on winged chariots, coming to weep at the foot of his mountain.

u The Childhood of Christ," an oratoricL-charrmng in its simplicity, and in which the music lisps the first words of the new-born God, accompanied by the song of the angels, seemed to have been better understood by the public.

Berlioz' friends, as they saw the fairly numerous spectators, would say to him, cc Well, they are coming at last ! " To which Berlioz would reply with a melan- choly smile, "Yes, they are coming; but I I am

going."

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His last attempt was the opera " The Trojans," performed at the Theatre-Lyrique. He had written the libretto himself, disdaining, like Wagner, to apply to a professional libretto writer. He believed, as did Gluck, that in an opera the words and the music should be closely bound together, and he did not approve of those breaks in the form of airs and cavatinas that stop the action. This opera, so different from what the public is accustomed to, contains great beauties 5 it is filled with a broad, pure feeling for antiquity, and at times there passes through it, sonorous as a trumpet- call, a wind of Homeric poetry.

If he had not attained " popularity in France, where, however, he counted ardent admirers, he had long before become popular abroad. In Germany he was known and applauded, and there he was reckoned one of the great modern masters. But day by day he became more sombre and bitter ; sorrow was changing more and more deeply bis noble face, like unto the face of an angry eagle, eager to dart into space but pre- vented from flying. His long, fair hair, that he used to shake so madly of yore as he conducted some mas- terpiece, had long since grown white. Stoic of art as he was he could not bear up under the death of a son

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he worshipped, though he had suffered so patiently for the sake of the beautiful, and though his self-love must have bled many a time. He wrapped himself up in shadow and silence, and then he died. It is only the grim and haughty that can love like that.

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MADAME DORVAL

Born in 1801 Died in 1849

MADAME DORVAL died of over sensitive- ness, of passion, of enthusiasm, of too free a giving out of her soul, of burning the oil too fast in a blazing lamp, of the indifference, the dis- dain of the directors of certain important theatres, of the silence which was settling around her name, once so famous, and especially of regret for the child she had lost, for as that great poet, Victor Hugo, says :

" Their little arms draw you strongly to the tomb."

I was scarcely acquainted with Mme. Dorval, yet I feel as if I had lost an intimate friend. A portion of my soul and of my youth has gone down into the grave with her ; for when one has long followed the career of an actress in the varied parts she has played on the stage, when one has loved, suffered, and wept as she loved, suffered, and wept under the names given her by poets' fancy, there is set up between her, a radiant figure, and the spectator lost in the shadow a magnetic

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relation that it is difficult not to believe must be recip- rocal. When the beloved lips speak your heart's secret thoughts in the verse of the master you admire, verse that you repeat with her, it seems as though it is for yourself alone that she speaks thus, for you alone that she has discovered those inflections of the voice that move a whole audience, for you alone that she has selected that particular part, that she has put a rose in her hair, a black velvet ribbon on her arm. As she realises the poet's dream, she becomes, for the critic, a sort of ideal mistress, the only one, perchance, whom he can love. Alfred de Musset's lines

" If true it be that Schiller loved none but Amelia,

Goethe none but Marguerite, Rousseau none but Julia, May they rest in peace for love they did ! "

are just as applicable to critics as to poets.

Adele d'Hervey, Kitty Bell, Marion de Lorme, you have all lived, so far as I was concerned, a real life ; you were no mere painted ghosts, separated from me by a row of lights ; I believed in your love, in your tears, in your despair ; never did my own griefs clutch at my heart and draw tears from my eyes as did yours, and if I survived your nightly death, it was because I hoped to see you again on the morrow sadder, more

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plaintive, more passionate, and more entrancing than ever. Ah! how jealous of Antony, Chatterton, and Didier I have been !

A great void is felt when the things that have been the passion of one's youth disappear one after another. How shall one again renew the emotion, the fury, the transports, the boundless devotion to art, the capacity for admiration, the absolute freedom from envy, char- acteristic of that splendid time, of that great Romanti- cist movement which, like the movement of the Renaissance, renovated art in all its parts, and brought out at one and the same time Lamartine, Hugo, Alex- andre Dumas, Alfred de Musset, Sand, Balzac, Sainte- Beuve, Auguste Barbier, Delacroix, Louis Boulanger, Ary Scheffer, Deveria, Decamps, David d' Angers, Barye, Hector Berlioz, Frederick Lemaitre, and Mme. Dorval, the latter of whom too soon vanished from the midst of that brilliant Pleiades, of which she was not one of the least luminous stars !

Frederick Lemaitre, whom I have just named, and Mme. Dorval formed a perfectly assorted dramatic couple. She was the true wife of Frederick, just as Frederick was truly her husband on the stage, I mean. Their respective talents completed each other

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and grew the greater by their combination. Frederick was the man to make that woman weep ; and how won- derfully, on the other hand, she knew the way to move him when his madness was overpast ! What accents she drew from him! Whoever has not seen them together, in "The Gamester," for instance, or in Peblo " or in " The Gardener of Valencia," has seen nothing; and can know fully neither Frederick nor Mme. Dorval. And to-day Frederick must feel that he is a widower in very truth.

The Theatre-Fran<jais must feel remorse at never having secured that great actress, as by and by it will regret having allowed Frederick Lernaitre, an actor greater and mightier than Talma, to degenerate at the Porte-Saint-Martin or to tour the provinces.

I have at least the consolation of knowing that the tributes which, like mourning flowers, I place on the tomb of the great actress, I paid her before she was laid in her bier, and that while she lived she had the satisfaction of enjoying my comprehensive and passion- ate admiration, my enthusiastic praise, a nectar sweeter to artists than the rarest wine offered them in chased cups. I am not a mere posthumous panegyrist who praises those only who have passed away, and who is

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willing to allow man or woman every possible quality once he or she is safely nailed up in his or her coffin. Why should not one be at once, as regards contempo- raries endowed with talent or genius, of the same opin- ion as posterity will be ? Why should one be satisfied with addressing lyrical effusions to their shades ?

I first remember Mme. Dorval in the first perform- ance of u Marion de Lorme." She had just passed from melodrama to drama, from the dialect of the Boulevard to poetry* And how proud and happy and radiant she was ! How thoroughly at home she seemed to be in that part of tremendous passion and of such high grade ! How easily she soared on steady wings, upborne by the Master's mighty breath! I can still see her with her long fair hair adorned with pearls, her white satin dress, and her maid, Dame Rose, disrobing her. The last part in which I saw her was that of Marie- Jeanne, another Marie, the name, her own, which so well suited her. She was no longer the bril- liant courtesan purified and softened by love, but the poor woman of the people, the Mother of Sorrows of the faubourg^ with the seven swords piercing her breast, like the Virgin on Calvary.

Her natural talent, which she had somewhat im-

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perilled by attempting tragedy in Ponsard's tc Lucrece," for instance, required if not elevated dramatic poetry, at least simple and touching truth. The poor lady, un- learned in the subjects of the many discussions of the day and obeying only the dictates of her heart, had for a moment given way to doubt and hesitation ; she had allowed herself to follow the Common Sense school, and had sought to declaim visions like a tragic actress at the Theatre-Fran^ais. Fortunately she took but one step along that wrong road. She perceived in time that one ought not to leave one's path, but that the things passionately loved in youth should be continued in the maturity of talent, not, however, chastened and made cold, but spurred on and driven onwards with even greater fire and fury, following those men of genius who, as they grow old, become grimmer and prouder, more ardent and fiercer, exaggerating their own characteristics constantly, as did Rembrandt, Michael Angelo, and Beethoven-

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FREDERICK LEMAITRE

FOR very many years I have made it a point not to miss seeing Frederick Lemaitre in every one of the new parts he has created, so that I know every aspect of his talent. It is always a noble and splendid spectacle to see that great actor, the only one in our midst who recalls Garrick, Kemble, and Macready, and especially Kean, make the frail wings of Boulevard theatres tremble under his mighty Shake- spearian voice.

What matters the kind of stage if a man be in- spired ? Has not Frederick Lemaitre drawn in crowds the most aristocratic and elegant society of Paris, into that narrow den called the Folies-Dramatiques, in which Robert Macaire would wake on the morrow of his execution, enlightened and rejuvenated by the guil- lotine, and having come to the conclusion that Gogo was a less troublesome victim than good Germeuil with his cream-coloured trousers ? People would have gone to see him even had he been performing under the can- vas tent of some fair show, behind a row of candles

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badly in need of being snuffed and between four smok- ing lamps.

It is strange that an actor of so much genius should not have been at once enrolled in the troupe of the Comedie-Fran^aise, though it is true that Balzac was never elected to the French Academy. Corporate bodies are always somewhat afraid of such great geniuses. It is the Comedie-Fran^aise, and not Frederick Lemaitre, that has been the sufferer, for the actor has been fol- lowed by poets and clever men in the course of his wanderings. At the Porte-Saint-Martin he found " Richard d'Arlington," " Gennaro," " Don Caesar de Bazan j " " Ruy Bias " at the Renaissance ; " Kean " at the Varietes ; and " Paillasse " at the Gaiete, to say nothing of scores of dramas to which his own power- ful individuality imparted life, and which when he played in them seemed to be masterpieces.

He enjoys, in common with all thorough actors, the gift of being terrible or comic, well-bred or vulgar, fierce or tender, of condescending to farce or ascend- ing to the most sublime poetic heights. Thus he can with equal talent declaim the imprecations of Ruy Bias in the council of ministers, or rattle out a clown's patter upon a village green. As Richard d' Arlington,

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ROMANTICIST STUDIES

he throws his wife out of the window as unconcernedly as he cooks the acrobat's soup and balances his boy on his nose. He says, " Play up, the band," as readily as

CC I hold him writhing under my armed heel,'* or

"I think you have just insulted your Queen,"

In Robert Macaire, the Mephistopheles of the bagnio, who is much cleverer than his prototype, he carried sarcasm to the thirtieth power, and hit upon incredible inflections of voice and amazingly eloquent gestures, while he was finer than ever in Paillasse, the clown.

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Histoire du Romantisme

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

See also

Full text (English translation of 1902)[1], in a translation by Frederick-Caesar de Sumichrast

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