ldier, Gautier in the Muses' bower
sat pondering his epithets and filing his phrases. Was it strength,
or was it weakness? His work survives and will survive by virtue of
its beauty--beauty somewhat hard and material, but such as the artist
sought. In 1872 Gautier died. By directing art to what is impersonal
he prepared the way for the Parnassien school, and may even be
recognised as one of the lineal predecessors of naturalism.

These--Lamartine, Vigny, Hugo, Musset, Gautier--are the names which
represent the poetry of nineteenth-century romance; four stars of
varying magnitudes, and one enormous cometary apparition. There was
also a _via lactea_, from which a well-directed glass can easily
disentangle certain orbs, pallid or fiery: Sainte-Beuve, a critic
and analyst of moral disease and disenchantment in the _Vie, Poesies
et Pensees de Joseph Delorme_; a singer of spiritual reverie, modest
pleasures, modest griefs, and tender memories in the _Consolations_
and the _Pensees d'Aout_; a virtuoso always in his metrical
researches; Auguste Barbier, eloquent in his indignant satires the
_Iambes_, lover of Italian art and nature in _Il Pianto_; Auguste
Brizeux, the idyllist, in his _Marie_, of Breton wilds and provincial
works and ways; Gerard de Nerval, Hegesippe Moreau, Madame
Desbordes-Valmore, and paler, lessening lights. These and others
dwindle for the eye into a general stream of luminous atoms.

VII

The weaker side of the romantic school is apparent in the theatre.
It put forth a magnificent programme of dramatic reform, which it
was unable to carry out. The preface to Victor Hugo's _Cromwell_
(1827) is the earliest and the most important of its manifestoes.
The poetry of the world's childhood, we are told, was lyrical; that
of its youth was epic; the poetry of its maturity is dramatic. The
drama aims at truth before all else; it seeks to represent complete
manhood, beautiful and revolting, sublime and grotesque. Whatever
is found in nature should be found in art; from multiple elements
an aesthetic whole is to be formed by the sovereignty of imagination;
unity of time, unity of place are worthless conventions; unity of
action remains, and must be maintained. The play meant to exemplify
the principles of Hugo's preface is of vast dimensions, incapable
of presentation on the stage; the large painting of life for which
he pleaded, and which he did not attain, is of a kind more suitable
to the novel than to the d