_Cinq-Mars_.]

The felicity of being enabled to know the causes of things, a recognised
and respectable form of happiness, is also one which I have recently
enjoyed in respect of Alfred de Vigny's _Cinq-Mars_. For Vigny as a poet
my admiration has always been profound. He appears to me to have
completed, with Agrippa d'Aubigne, Corneille, and Victor Hugo, the
_quatuor_ of French poets who have the secret of magnificence;[247] and,
scanty as the amount of his poetical work is, _Eloa_, _Dolorida_, _Le
Cor_, and the finest passages in _Les Destinees_ have a definite variety
of excellence and essence which it would not be easy to surpass in kind,
though it might be in number, with the very greatest masters of poetry.
But I have never been able, frankly and fully, to enjoy his novels,
especially _Cinq-Mars_. In my last reading of the chief of them I came
upon an edition which contains what I had never seen before--the
somewhat triumphant and strongly defiant tract, _Reflexions sur la
Verite dans l'Art_, which the author prefixed to his book after its
success. This tractate is indeed not quite consistent with itself, for
it ends in confession that truth in art is truth in observation of human
nature, not mere authenticity of fact, and that such authenticity is of
merely secondary importance at best. But in the opening he had taken
lines--or at any rate had said things--which, if not absolutely
inconsistent with, certainly do not lead to, this sound conclusion. In
writing historical novels (he tells us) he thought it better not to
imitate the foreigners (it is clear that this is a polite way of
indicating Scott), who in their pictures put the historical dominators
of them in the background; he has himself made such persons principal
actors. And though he admits that "a treatise on the decline and fall of
feudalism in France; on the internal conditions and external relations
of that country; on the question of military alliances with foreigners;
on justice as administered by parliaments, and by secret commissions on
charges of sorcery," might not have been read while the novel _was_;
the sentence suggests, with hardly a possibility of rebuttal, that a
treatise of this kind was pretty constantly in his own mind while he was
writing the novel itself. And the earlier sentence about putting the
more important historical characters in the foreground remains "firm,"
without any necessity for argument or suggestion.

[Sidenote: The f