rdinary silliness of the style and sentiments. I
should imagine that M. d'Arlincourt was trying to write like his brother
viscount, the author of _Les Martyrs_, and a pretty mess he has made of
it. "Le char de la nuit roulait silencieux sur les plaines du ciel" (p.
3). "L'entree du jour venait de s'elancer radieuse du palais de
l'Aurore." "L'amante de l'Erebe et la mere des Songes[79] avait acheve
la moitie de sa course tenebreuse," etc., etc. The historic present is
constantly battling with the more ordinary tenses--the very same
sentence sometimes contains both. And this half-blown bladder of a style
conveys sentiments as feebly pompous as itself. The actual story, though
no great thing, is, if you could strip it of its froth and fustian, not
so very bad: as told it is deplorable.

At the same time its mere existence--much more the fury of acceptance
which for the moment greeted it--shows what that moment wanted. It
wanted Romance, and in default of better it took _Le Solitaire_.

* * * * *

An occasional contrast of an almost violent kind may be permitted in a
work requiring something more than merely catalogue-composition. It can
hardly be found more appropriately than by concluding this chapter,
which began with the account of Paul de Kock, by one of Charles Nodier.

[Sidenote: Nodier.]

To the student and lover of literature there is scarcely a more
interesting figure in French literary history, though there are many
greater. Except a few scraps (which, by one of the odd ways of the
book-world, actually do not appear in some editions of his _Oeuvres
Choisies_), he did nothing which had the quality of positive greatness
in it. But he was a considerable influence: and even more of a "sign."
Younger than Chateaubriand and Madame de Stael, but far older than any
of the men of 1830 proper, he may be said in a way to have, in his
single person, played in France that part of schoolmaster to
Romanticism, which had been distributed over two generations and many
personalities in England; and which Germany, after a fashion, did
without, at the cost of a few undisciplined and quickly overbloomed
master-years. Although he was born in 1780, nine years before the
Revolution itself, he underwent German and English influences early,
"took" Wertherism, Terrorism,[80] and other maladies of that _fin de
siecle_ with the utmost facility, and produced divers ultra-Romantic
things long before 1830 its