French Lyrics | Page 5

personal experience of the world.
CHATEAUBRIAND made the great revelation of the change that had
taken place, and in spite of the fact that his instrument is prose, the lyric
quality of many a passage of René was as unmistakable as it was new.
But the lyric impulse could not at once shake off literary tradition. It
needed to learn a new language, one more direct and personal, one less
stiff with the starch of propriety and elegance. The more spontaneous
and genuine it became, the closer it approached this language.
DELAVIGNE won great applause by his _Messéniennes_ (1815-19),
but the lyric impulse was not strong enough in him to make him
independent of the traditional rhetoric. MME.
DESBORDES-VALMORE, less influenced by literary training and
more mastered by the emotion that prompted her, found the real lyric
note. But it was especially LAMARTINE whose poetic utterance was
most spontaneous and who recovered for France the gift of lyric
expression. His _Méditations poétiques_ (1820) were greeted with
extraordinary enthusiasm and marked the dawn of a new era in French
poetry.
But other influences making for a poetic revival were multiplied. A
very important one was the spreading knowledge of other modern
literatures, particularly those of England and Germany with their lyric
treasures. Presently there began to be a union of efforts for a literary
reform, as in the Renaissance, and the Romantic movement began to be

defined. Its watchword was freedom in art, and as a reform it was
naturally considerably determined by the classicism against which it
rebelled. The qualities that it strove to possess were sharply in contrast
with those that had distinguished French poetry for two hundred years,
if they were not in direct opposition to them: in its matter, breadth and
infinite variety took the place of a narrow and sterile
nobility--"everything that is in nature is in art"; in its language,
directness, strength, vigor, freshness, color, brilliancy, picturesqueness,
replaced cold propriety, conventional elegance and trite periphrasis; in
its form, melody, variety of rhythm, richness and sonority of rhyme,
diversity of stanza structure and flexibility of line were sought and
achieved, sometimes at the expense of the old rules. By 1830 the young
poets, who were now fairly swarming, exhibited the general romantic
coloring very clearly. Almost from the first VICTOR HUGO had been
their leader. His earliest volume indeed contained little promise of a
literary revolution. But the volume of Orientales (1828) was more than
a promise; it held a large measure of fulfilment, and is a landmark in
the history of French poetry. The technical qualities of these lyrics were
a revelation. They distinctly enlarged the capacity of the language for
lyrical expression.
There are three other great lyric poets in the generation of 1830: DE
VIGNY, DE MUSSET, and GAUTIER. De Vigny annexed to the
domain of lyric poetry the province of intellectual passion and a more
impersonal and reflecting emotion. De Musset gave to the lyric the
most intense and direct accent of personal feeling and made his muse
the faithful and responsive echo of his heart. Gautier was an artist in
words and laid especial stress on the perfection of form (cf. l'Art, p.
190); and it was he especially that the younger poets followed.
By the middle of the century the main springs of Romanticism began to
show symptoms of exhaustion. The subjective and personal character
of its lyric verse provoked protest. It seemed to have no other theme but
self, to be a universal confession or self-glorification, immodest and
egotistical. And it began to be increasingly out of harmony with the
intellectual temper, which was determined more and more by positive
philosophy and the scientific spirit. LECONTE DE LISLE voiced this

protest most clearly (cf. les Montreurs, p. 199), and set forth the claims
of an art that should find its whole aim in the achievement of an
objective beauty and should demand of the artist perfect self-control
and self-repression. For such an art personal emotion was proclaimed a
hindrance, as it might dim the artist's vision or make his hand unsteady.
Those who viewed art in this way, while they turned frankly away from
the earlier Romanticists, yet agreed with them in their concern for form,
and applied themselves to carrying still farther the technical mastery
over it which they had achieved. Their standpoint greatly emphasized
the importance of good workmanship, and the stress laid upon form
was revealed, among other ways, by a revival of the old fixed forms.
The young generation of poets that began to write just after the middle
of the century, generally recognized LECONTE DE LISLE as their
master, and were called Parnassiens from le Parnasse contemporain, a
collection of verse to which they contributed. They produced a
surprising amount of work distinguished by exquisite finish,