tself full of
irony, of disillusion, he distinguishes two books, Senancour's Obermann
and Chateaubriand's Genie du Christianisme, as characteristic of the
first decade of the present century. In those two books we detect
already the disease and the cure--in Obermann the irony, refined into a
plaintive philosophy of "indifference"--in Chateaubriand's Genie du
Christianisme, the refuge from a tarnished actual present, a present of
disillusion, into a world of strength and beauty in the Middle Age, as
at an earlier period--in Rene and Atala--into the free play of them in
savage life. It is to minds in this spiritual situation, weary of the
present, but yearning for the spectacle of beauty and strength, that
the works of French romanticism appeal. They set a positive value on
the intense, the exceptional; and a certain distortion is sometimes
noticeable in them, as in conceptions like Victor Hugo's Quasimodo, or
Gwynplaine, something of a terrible grotesque, of the macabre, as the
French themselves call it; though always combined with perfect literary
execution, as in Gautier's La Morte Amoureuse, or the scene of the
"maimed" burial-rites of the player, dead of the frost, in his
Capitaine Fracasse--true "flowers of the yew." It becomes grim humour
in Victor Hugo's combat of Gilliatt with the devil-fish, or the
incident, with all its ghastly comedy drawn [254] out at length, of the
great gun detached from its fastenings on shipboard, in
Quatre-Vingt-Trieze (perhaps the most terrible of all the accidents
that can happen by sea) and in the entire episode, in that book, of the
Convention. Not less surely does it reach a genuine pathos; for the
habit of noting and distinguishing one's own most intimate passages of
sentiment makes one sympathetic, begetting, as it must, the power of
entering, by all sorts of finer ways, into the intimate recesses of
other minds; so that pity is another quality of romanticism, both
Victor Hugo and Gautier being great lovers of animals, and charming
writers about them, and Murger being unrivalled in the pathos of his
Scenes de la Vie de Jeunesse. Penetrating so finely into all
situations which appeal to pity, above all, into the special or
exceptional phases of such feeling, the romantic humour is not afraid
of the quaintness or singularity of its circumstances or expression,
pity, indeed, being of the essence of humour; so that Victor Hugo does
but turn his romanticism into practice, in his h