rococo pseudo-classicism of the later versifiers of the eighteenth century, it is the delicate flavour of true Hellenism that breathes from them; and, as one reads them, one is reminded alternately of Theocritus and of Keats. Like Keats, Chénier was cut off when he had hardly more than given promise of what his achievement might have been. His brief and tragic apparition in the midst of the Revolution is like that of some lovely bird flitting on a sudden out of the darkness and the terror of a tempest, to be overcome a moment later, and whirled to destruction.

The lines upon which the Romantic Movement was to develop had no connection whatever with Chénier's exquisite art. Throughout French Literature, it is easy to perceive two main impulses at work, which, between them, have inspired all the great masterpieces of the language. On the one hand, there is that positive spirit of searching and unmitigated common sense which has given French prose its peculiar distinction, which lies at the root of the wonderful critical powers of the nation, and which has produced that remark-. able and persistent strain of Realism-of absolute fidelity to the naked truth-common to the earliest Fabliaux of the Middle Ages

and the latest Parisian novel of to-day. On the other hand, there is in French literature a totally different almost a contradictorytendency, which is no less clearly marked and hardly less important-the tendency towards pure Rhetoric. This love of language for its own sake of language artfully ordered, splendidly adorned, moving, swelling, irresistible -may be seen alike in the torrential sentences of Rabelais, in the sonorous periods of Bossuet, and in the passionate tirades of Corneille. With the great masters of the seventeenth century-Pascal, Racine, La Fontaine, La Bruyère the two influences met, and achieved a perfect balance. In their work, the most penetrating realism is beautified and ennobled by all the resources of linguistic art, while the rhetorical instinct is preserved from pomposity and inflation by a supreme critical sense. With the eighteenth century, however, a change came. The age was a critical age— an age of prose and common sense; the rhetorical impulse faded away, to find expression only in melodramatic tragedy and dull verse; and the style of Voltaire, so brilliant and yet so colourless, so limited and yet so infinitely sensible, symbolised the literary character of the century. The Romantic Movement was an immense reaction

against the realism which had come to such { perfection in the acid prose of Voltaire. It was a reassertion of the rhetorical instinct in all its strength and in all its forms. There was no attempt simply to redress the balance; no wish to revive the studied perfection of the classical age. The realistic spirit was almost completely abandoned. The pendulum swung violently from one extreme to the other.

The new movement had been already faintly discernible in Diderot's bright colouring and the oratorical structure of Rousseau's writing. But it was not until after the Revolution, in the first years of the nineteenth century, that the Romantic spirit completely declared itself-in the prose of CHATEAUBRIAND. Chateaubriand was, at bottom, a rhetorician pure and simple- a rhetorician in the widest sense of the word. It was not merely that the resources of his style were enormous in colour, movement, and imagery, in splendour of rhythm, in descriptive force; but that his whole caste of mind was in itself rhetorical, and that he saw, felt, and thought with the same emphasis, the same amplitude, the same romantic sensibility with which he wrote. The three subjects which formed the main themes of all his work and gave occasion for his finest passages were Christianity, Nature,

and himself. His conception of Christianity was the very reverse of that of the eighteenth century. In his Génie du Christianisme and his Martyrs the analytical and critical spirit of his predecessors has entirely vanished; the religion which they saw simply as a collection of theological dogmas, he envisioned as a living creed, arrayed in all the hues of poetry and imagination, and redolent with the mystery of the past. Yet it may be doubted whether Chateaubriand was essentially more religious than Voltaire. What Voltaire dissected in the dry light of reason, Chateaubriand invested with the cloak of his own eloquenceput it up, so to speak, on a platform, in a fine attitude, under a tinted illumination. He lacked the subtle intimacy of Faith. In his descriptions of Nature, too, the same characteristics appear. Compared with Rousseau's, they are far bolder, far richer, composed on a more elaborate and imposing scale; but they are less convincing; while Rousseau's landscapes are often profoundly moving, Chateaubriand's are hardly ever more than splendidly picturesque. There is a similar relation between the egoisms of the two men. Chateaubriand was never tired of writing about himself; and in his long Mémoires d'Outre Tombe-the most permanently interesting of

his works passion.

he gave a full rein to his favourite His conception of himself was Byronic. He swells forth, in all his pages, a noble, melancholy, proud, sentimental creature whom every man must secretly envy and every woman passionately adore. He had all the vanity of Rousseau, but none of his honesty. Rousseau, at any rate, never imposed upon himself; and Chateaubriand always did. Thus the vision that we have of him is of something wonderful but empty, something striking but unreal. It is the rhetorician that we see, and not the man.

Chateaubriand's influence was very great. Beside his high-flowing, romantic, imaginative writings, the tradition of the eighteenth century seemed to shrivel up into something thin, cold, and insignificant. A new and dazzling world swam into the ken of his readers a world in which the individual reigned in glory amid the glowing panorama of Nature and among the wondrous visions of a remote and holy past. His works became at once highly popular, though it was not until a generation later that their full effect was felt. Meanwhile, the impetus which he had started was continued in the poems of LAMARTINE. Here there is the same love of Nature, the same religious outlook, the same