Late French romanticism

French Romanticism refers to the Romantic era in French literature and art from the second half of the 18th century to the first half of the 19th century. French literature from the first half of the century was dominated by Romanticism, which is associated with such authors as Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, père, François-René de Chateaubriand, Alphonse de Lamartine, Gérard de Nerval, Charles Nodier, Alfred de Musset, Théophile Gautier and Alfred de Vigny. Their influence was felt in theatre, poetry, prose fiction. The effect of the romantic movement would continue to be felt in the latter half of the century in diverse literary developments, such as “realism”, “symbolism”, and the so-called fin de siècle “decadent” movement.

French romanticism used forms such as the historical novel, the romance, the “roman noir” or Gothic novel; subjects like traditional myths (including the myth of the romantic hero), nationalism, the natural world (i.e. elegies by lakes), and the common man; and the styles of lyricism, sentimentalism, exoticism and orientalism. Foreign influences played a big part in this, especially those of Shakespeare, Sir Walter Scott, Byron, Goethe, and Friedrich Schiller. French Romanticism had ideals diametrically opposed to French classicism and the classical unities, but it could also express a profound loss for aspects of the pre-revolutionary world in a society now dominated by money and fame, rather than honor.

In 1830, further political and social upheaval took place through the July Revolution ; The romantics of the first generation were meanwhile established. While early Romanticism focused on the individual’s position in society and the portrayal of his passionate mental states, the growing social conflicts of industrialization led some of the romantics, such as Victor Hugo and Alphonse de Lamartine , to turn to social problems. The younger poets (“second generation”) like Théophile Gautier , Paul de Musset and Charles Nodier, however, were after the seizure of powerthe bourgeoisie, whom they hated, deeply disappointed. They carried their contempt demonstratively outward through provocative behavior, clothing, etc. The increasing commercialization of art often forced them to engage in journalistic activities to earn money – a circumstance that was repugnant to them. In contrast to the concept of l’art social , they developed a direction of elitist l’art pour l’art , art for the sake of art (and not out of consideration for society). Ultimately, the romantic drama failed, following the failure of Hugo’s Les Burgraves(1843) was unmistakable. On the one hand it could not establish itself among the public, because this was just bourgeois and inclined more to the classical music; on the other hand, censorship did not allow full implementation of contemporary romantic drama (Hugos Marion Delorme and Le roi s’amuse were banned).

If Romanticism was partly a primitive and native return to Germany in France , it was a reaction against the national literature. English and German literatures had only momentarily enslaved themselves to the discipline of classicism , under the predominant influence of our great century; and what is properly called romanticism beyond the Channel and beyond the Rhine is the literary period in which the northern genius, recovering consciousness of itself, repudiates French imitation. In France, on the contrary, a country of Greco-Latin culture and tradition, literature was classic since the Renaissance , and we call romanticwriters who at the beginning of the xix th century, freed themselves of the rules of thought, in opposition to classicism and realism of the philosophers of the xviii th century.

Not only in Germany, this revolution was accomplished in one fell swoop in France. Because of its character of breaking with the national tradition, and not with passing habits, of foreign import, it was later and had more difficulty to be realized. Started in reality around 1750 , it did not reach its end until a century later. Prepared the xviii th century, and even contained repressed during the Revolution and the Empire , she is mature only under the Restoration and his triumph was claimed to 1830 after the fiery and passionate struggles.

The romantic battle (1820-1830)
Causes of the completion of romanticism in our literature
The literary revolution prepared the 18th century, announced by Chateaubriand and Germaine de Stael, yet hatched long enough. The book of Germaine de Stael in particular remained for several years buried by the care of the imperial police. As long as the Empire lasted, literature was official, like all manifestations of opinion. It seemed that classical poetry was under the high protection of the government, and that orthodoxy was part of the fidelity of a good citizen.

But the generation of 1815, more sensitive and more trembling than that of Rene, tormented more cruelly by the boredom, because it had more to entertain, after the fall of Napoleon, the danger of the battles and the inebriation victories, was less willing to submit to social laws and more prompt to make the “me” the measure of the universe. It is this tormented and proud “me” that she would seek to express. The artists, abandoning at last the forms left to them by the past, would translate these emotions into works of beauty; and from then on, a new period would begin in the history of our letters.

The first triumph: The “Meditations” of Lamartine
In 1820 appear the Meditations of Lamartine (1790-1869). It’s like a thunderclap. In France, we did not yet know a sensitivity so sincere and so simmering; we had never felt a poetic breath so wide and so invigorating. “Towards love and an unknown love in France since the imitators of Petrarch; deep and melancholy melancholy, without any mixture of blandness or languor, in an exquisite measure of taste; immortal things done with nothing, as are always done things that come from the heart; rustic pictures which seemed very new, although nature had been painted for sixty years, because it was nature seen with the eyes of a real rustic “(Faguet); these original and delightful inspirations, which suddenly and magnificently reopened all the great sources of human emotion, were for the contemporaries as the awakening of a new world.

The Lake, the Isolation, the Autumn, the Valley, carried to perfection this personal, sentimental and descriptive poetry, elegiac and feverish, which was to be one of the triumphs of Romanticism; the Temple and the Immortality inaugurated a philosophical and religious poetry of a new sound of which Victor Hugo and Alfred de Vigny were going to be inspired, and that Lamartine himself, ten years later, was to bring to perfection in the Harmonies.

Frantic Romanticism

The frenetic Romanticism (or frénétisme ) is a French literary movement of the first half of the xix th century, inspired in part by the Gothic novel English ( Horace Walpole , Ann Radcliffe , Lewis , Maturin ) and the movement Sturm und Drang German ( The Sufferings of the young Werther of Goethe in particular, who made suicide a fashionable literary subject ), in the rejection of the Enlightenment spirit and the classical rigor ofxvii th century and the xviii th century.

History
Only a few years before the publication of the first truly works frantic , Victor Hugo justified in his poem In André Chénier looking for a more brutal romanticism, darker, wishing away with the idea of a lyrical and naive romanticism founded on the imitation of a pathetic nature.

Characteristics
Frenzied romanticism is characterized by a desire for the absolute and an impossibility of realizing this desire, an existential dilemma whose pain is expressed by a fierce irony, an exacerbated cynicism, feelings driven to their paroxysm, visual delirium (motivated by the consumption of hallucinogenic substances, hashish , opium , alcohols ).

Thus, it can be considered as a “counterpart to the absurdity and injustice of the world” , expressed by an “intimate mixture of comedy and tragedy, […] alternating or combined bursts of laughter. Flaubert in short will call later the grotesque sad ” ( Jean Bruneau ). In his analysis of Pieces de pièces, Temps perdu , by Xavier Forneret , Tristan Maya defines “the main characteristics of the frenzy: the obsession with death, the carnal decomposition, the destruction in the tomb, the destruction of oneself, but also the exasperation of horror to reach thrills”.

Above all, “frantic” writers are those who are described as ” little romantics “, “bousingos” or Jeune-France , especially Pétrus Borel , considered to be the frenetic par excellence, but also Gérard de Nerval , Théophile Gautier , Philothée O ‘Neddy ( Fire and Flame , 1833), Xavier Forneret ( The Black Man , 1835), Charles Lassailly ( The Roueries of Trialph, our contemporary before his suicide , 1833), Aloysius Bertrand ( Gaspard of the night , 1842).

Posterity of Freneticism
From the large number of works that seem to belong to the frenzied vein, we can think that a large number of writers have tried, including Victor Hugo , including passages or themes of The Man Who Laughs and Notre Dame of Paris 4 appear directly inspired, but also Charles Nodier and Flaubert , in some of his works called “youth” ( Drunk and dead and Funeral of Dr. Mathurin ).

Frenzied Romanticism will have an underground influence on a large number of works and writers, including the Count of Lautréamont ( The Songs of Maldoror , 1869), Rimbaud ( A Season in Hell , 1873), Maurice Rollinat ( The Neuroses , 1883 ), Iwan Gilkin ( The Night , 1893), or even Kierkegaard ( Diary of the Seducer , 1843).

The romantic battle
Two years after the Meditations, appears a new collection of poems: Odes of Victor Hugo. This collection, as well as poems that were published in the French Muse young and sentimental writers like Alfred de Vigny, Emile Deschamps, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Amable Tastu, Sophie and Delphine Gay (future M me Girardin) redoubled success that the new poetic form was getting in the general public.

But this new poetry did not have the good fortune to please the academicians. Following the example of the French Academy, the provincial academies were furious with those audacious young people, and it was they who, by obstinacy, prevented the revolution from being accomplished peacefully, and forced it to take on a character. excessive reaction against old doctrines. Sheltering their poverty and their absolute lack of imagination and style behind the great names of Corneille and Racine, whom they claimed to have been attacked in their own person by the innovators, the last representatives of tradition and classical methods resolutely began the struggle.

It was a real war. To the ardor of the literary principles was added those of political principles; for it must be remarked that the Romantics were royalists, and the liberal classics; that those who preached freedom in art were absolutists in politics, and that the liberals, on the other hand, did not want to suffer the slightest emancipation in the literary field. The imitation of antiquity having been one of the characters of the Revolution and the Empire, it was natural that the restored kingship turn their backs on antiquity. So did poetry. She becomes a royalist and a Catholicat the same time as romantic. Romanticism thus settled in France with an air of piety for the national past, for the ancient traditions of the French spirit violently interrupted by the Revolution. The most innovative of the literary revolutions seemed to take itself for a restoration.

The fight for poetry
It came to blows from the publication of the first volume of verses by Victor Hugo, his Odes, soon increased by Ballades. There was still no great audacity in this classic poetry in its brilliant rhetoric, but the school of Delille and Luce de Lancival found it barbaric. Indeed, on November 25, 1824, Auger, director of the Academy, having to receive Soumetcongratulated him on his “literary orthodoxy,” and, blaming the “barbaric poetics” of the “nascent sect,” he added: “No, it is not you, sir, who thinks impossible the alliance of genius with the reason, boldness with taste, originality with respect for the rules… It is not you who make common cause with those lovers of beautiful nature… who would gladly exchange Phèdre and Iphigénie against Faust and Goetz Berlichingen “.

Soon the tone rose, and the language of the Academy was nothing less than academic. Baour-Lormian, fired his barrel of alarm, treating the romantics of swine, using a periphrasis:

It seems like access from their stupid rage
Has transformed their features and their language;
It seems, hearing them groaning on my way,
That they saw Circe the wand in my hand.
Nepomucene Lemercier appealed to the courts, crying:

With impunity Hugo make verses!

The Constitutional, a rival newspaper of the French Muse, wondered whether there would not be, finally, among the dramatic authors, a Moliere or a Regnard to deliver the Romantics to public ridicule in a good comedy in five acts; and Duvergier de Hauranne, Hugo ‘s future confrere at the Academy, replied: “Romanticism is not ridiculous, it is a disease, like somnambulism and epilepsy. A romantic is a man whose mind begins to alienate. We must pity him, talk to him reason, bring him back little by little; but it can not be the subject of a comedy; it is at most that of a thesis ofmedicine. ”

The preface of Cromwell
That’s what Cromwell’s preface says(1827). What Victor Hugo proclaims in this manifesto is liberalism in art, that is to say, the right of the writer to accept no other rules than that of his fantasy; it is the return to the truth, to life, that is to say, the right for the writer to do, if he likes, to squeeze the sublime by the grotesque, and to consider everything in his mind. personal point of view. Broadly summarizing the history of poetry, Victor Hugo expressed himself in these terms: “Poetry has three ages, each of which corresponds to an era of society: the ode, the epic, the drama. The primitive times are lyrical, the ancient times are epic, the modern times are dramatic. The drama is complete poetry. It is in drama that everything comes to fruition in modern poetry. The character of the drama is the real. Reality results from the natural combination of two types, the sublime and the grotesque, which intersect in drama as they intersect in life and creation. For true poetry, complete poetry is in the harmony of opposites… All that is in nature is in art. ”

Back to the truth, expression of the integral life, freedom in the art, were the formulas of the new school, whose followers had held since 1824 their headquarters, their ” Cenacle “, as it was called, in the living room of Charles Nodier, librarian of the Arsenal, which Victor Hugo had now become the undisputed leader.

The fight against the theater
By attacking the theater from the beginning, Victor Hugo attacked the enemy head-on. Combining talent with talent, he took care to proclaim above his adversaries the marvels of the past masters, Corneille, Racine, Moliere, who was constantly opposed to him. All who thought, all who still cared for the grandeur of the letters, understood the scope of the manifesto. In Victor Hugo narrated by a witness of his life, we find the story of a conversation that took place at that time between the poet and Talma. What the great tragic author says is characteristic:”The actor is nothing without the role, and I have never had a real role. I never had a room like I should have. Tragedy is beautiful, it’s noble, it’s great. I would have wanted so much grandeur with more reality, a character who had the variety and movement of life, which was not all of a piece, which was tragic and familiar, a king who was a man… The truth that’s what I’ve been looking for in my life. But what do you want? I ask Shakespeare, I’m given Ducis. ”

Everyone agreed: there was a need for a renewed literature. The eagerness with which the public crowded at the Odeon, where English authors came to give representations of Shakespeare’s plays, testifies to this, for it was necessary that public opinion should have pronounced itself in favor of new ideas so that the The rude masterpieces of the English poet were to be applauded.

But another thing was the representation of foreign masterpieces, and another thing that of new pieces, conceived by Frenchmen in the same ideas. No one whistles by a book, nor a preface; it was at the theater that the newcomers were expected. But Lamartine did not think of the theater, any more than Prosper Merimee, whose Theater of Clara Gazul was impossible on the stage, and which the author was careful not to wear. It was therefore who would open fire. Vigny was going to risk himself by the translation of Othello, when a young man of twenty-seven, a stranger, the day before still obscure secretary of the Duke of Orleansobtained a brilliant success at the French theater. In a day, Alexandre Dumas had become famous; his drama was called Henry III and his court. The room is a little heavy and has aged a lot, but it contained enough daring scenes to raise storms. The great scene of the third act, in particular, in which the Duc de Guise, crushing his wife’s wrists, forced her to give an appointment at Saint-Mégrin, astounded the audience, and, astonishment passed, conquered her. The success was unheard of, brilliant. The classics, surprised, could not do it. From that day it was possible to say that the cause of the new school was won.

The battle however was not over. The Othello de Vigny appeared, and the criticism at bay thus interpreting it in a diary of the time of the first performance: “One arrived at the representation of the More of Venice like to a battle whose success was to decide a great literary question. It was about whether Shakespeare, Schiller and Goethewere going to chase Corneille, Racine and Voltaire from the French scene. It was bad faith, but good strategy; the question thus displaced gave reason to those who asked it. But in reality it was not a question of driving out the masters of the art of their secular Parnassus; it was simply asked, as one writer ingeniously put it, “that the liberty of literary cults was proclaimed. ” Othellosucceeds despite a beautifully organized opposition. The classics came up in the corridors of the theater and said, “How do you find Othello? It’s beautiful ! But Iago! it’s more beautiful! And to all repeat on the most discordant meow intonations: “Iago! Iago! “. Nothing was done, the room was subdued before the dark roars of African jealousy that the timid Ducis had heard only attenuated echoes.

The Battle of Hernani and the final triumph
The way was not only open, but almost cleared. Victor Hugo came to the rescue. His drama of Cromwell was far too great to be played. The poet took up the pen and wrote Marion de Lorme, which censorship stopped. Hugo, indefatigable, created Hernani and the decisive battle took place.

As soon as the reception of the play was known by the reading committee of the Comédie-Française, seven academicians sent a petition to the king asking that this theater be closed to “playwrights”. Charles X spiritually escaped it. literature, he says, I have only my place on the floor. ” Exasperation redoubled. We try to refuse Hernaniby censorship. This one, which was not favorable to the poet, committed the fault, if fault is there, to authorize the representation of this piece, on the pretext that it was such a “fabric of extravagances” that the author and his friends would definitely be discredited to the public. “It is good,” said the report, “that the public sees how far astray the human spirit can be, free from all rules and propriety. Other alerts: Mademoiselle Mars, who played the role of doña Sol, could not resign herself to calling Firmin, who played the role of Hernani, his “superb and generous lion”. The author threatened to take away his role. She then accepted the lion at rehearsals, but with thefor the public, which she did. On the other hand, the slap was ready to betray. The poet, who was reluctant to applaud employees, wanted freedom on the floor as he claimed on stage. The slap was suppressed. Romantic youth, writers and artists, Bousingots and Jeune-France, offered to the master to replace them. “Everyone received for pass a square of red paper, stamped with a mysterious claw registering at the corner of the bill the Spanish word hierro, which means iron. this motto, of a Castilian height appropriate to the character of Hernani, meant that one must be, in the struggle, frank, brave and faithful like the sword. It was. The episodes of this epic melee have been told twenty times.

“From one o’clock in the afternoon (February 28, 1830), the passers-by of the Rue Richelieu saw accumulated at the door of the theater a band of being wild and bizarre, bearded, hairy, dressed anyway, except fashionable: in a tunic, in a Spanish cloak, in a Robespierre waistcoat, in a hat at the Henry III, having all the ages and all the countries on their shoulders and on their heads, in the middle of Paris, at midday. The burghers stopped, stupefied and indignant. M. Theophile Gautier, above all, insulted his eyes by a scarlet satin waistcoat, fastened on a pale green trousers with a black velvet band, and by the thick hair which descended to his loins. ”

The door did not open; the tribes impeded the circulation. Classical art could not calmly see these barbarous hordes that would invade its asylum; he picked up all the sweeps and garbage of the theater, and threw them on the besiegers. M. de BalzacHe received a piece of cabbage. The door opened at three o’clock and closed. Only in the room, they organized themselves. The places settled, it was still only half-past three; what to do up to seven? We talked, we sang, but the conversation and the songs are exhausted. Fortunately we had come too early to have dinner, so we had brought sausages, sausages, ham, bread, and so on. We had dinner, then. As we had nothing to do, we dined so long that we were still at table when the public entered (Victor Hugo recounted). At the sight of this restaurant, the public of the lodges wondered if he dreamed; bothered by the smell of garlic and sausage, the beautiful ladies and the correct classics protested, and it is in the midst of

The victory was won by a strong struggle; during the entr’actes, scenes of pugilats, breaking of benches, and hats smashed with fists, testified, more than the excellence of the new literary doctrines, of the vigor of their champions. “It would be difficult,” writes Gautier, forty-four years later, in a style in which the ardor of the fight still vibrates, “to describe the effect which the singular, masculine, and strong verses of the audience produced on the audience. so strange a turn, so horny and so shakespearian at once. Two systems, two parties, two armies, even two civilizations, it is not too much to say, were in presence, hating each other cordially, as one hates oneself in literary hatreds. Some worms were taken and picked up, like redoubts disputed by each army with equal obstinacy. One day, the romantics removed a tirade that the enemy took again the next day and from where it was necessary to dislodge it. What a noise! what cries! what hoots! what whistles! what hurricanes of bravos! what thunders of applause! Party leaders disguised themselves as the heroes ofHomer… For this generation, Hernani was what Cid was for the contemporaries of Corneille. All that was young, valiant, amorous, poetic, received the breath… The charm still lasts for those who were captivated. ”

The reign of Romanticism (1830-1843)

Poetry
While the revolution was taking place in the theater, a whole new, original and strong literature was developing in the book. The first Meditations of Lamartine and Hugo’s Odes and Ballades have already been mentioned. Lamartine gave in 1823 the New Meditations, in 1825 the Last Song of the Pilgrimage of Childe Harold, following the Pilgrimage of Childe Harolde of Byron, in 1830 Poetic and Religious Harmonies, where are some of his most beautiful pieces. Hugo, who gave in 1829 the Orientales, will give in 1831 the Autumn Leaves, in 1835 the Song of Twilight, in 1837 the Inner Voices, in 1840 the Rays and Shadows. Alfred de Vigny published in 1826 his poems antique and modern, inspired mainly by Biblical and Homeric antiquity and medieval times.

Beside these three great choral conductors, a whole ardent and young pleiad rushes to the battle for the independence of art. Sainte-Beuve, the author of the Chart of French poetry in the xvi th century, having risen Ronsard, du Bellay, the former Pleiades, also becomes a poet under the pseudonym of Joseph Delorme. Emile Deschamps turns to Spain, following the example of his master Hugo, and makes known to France, in the Romance of King Rodrigue, the beauties of the Spanish romancero. Théophile Gautierpublishes, at the end of 1830, his first verses where he reveals himself at once as a master of form. Alfred de Musset especially publishes in 1829 his tales of Spain and Italy, eminently romantic with their dislocated verses with unforeseen rhymes and too rich, and the accumulation of processes dear to the drama and novel of the young school (fierce jealousies, poisonings, duels, etc.); but, from 1829 to 1841, changing his style and drawing from his own experience the material of his poetry, he shouted the suffering he felt to have loved and will give a series of immortal poems: the four Nights of May, of December, August, October, thethe Souvenir.

The novel
At the same time as poetry, the novel also claimed to be victorious.

Victor Hugo had given in 1823 Han of Iceland and in 1826 Bug-Jargal, “terrible” novels whose hilarious imaginations make today smile. but in 1831 he published Our Lady of Paris, where it is raised around a cathedral living and almost hallucinatory, the Paris of the xv th century, with its black and filthy streets and school children swarm of beggars and mobsters. In this way of the historical novel, he had been preceded by Vigny, whose Cinq-Mars had appeared in 1826.

Soon Alexandre Dumas, inexhaustible storyteller and always amusing, will fascinate France by his pseudo-historical novels and by his wonderful stories of fights and adventures which are still in all the memories (the Three Musketeers, Twenty years later, the Viscount of Bragelonne, the Count of Monte Cristo); George Sand will give his novels of Lelia, Indiana, works of revolt and pain, and Consuelo; Balzac will raise from 1829 to 1850 his monumental Human Comedy.

The love of the national past, which had inspired great works for poets, novelists, playwrights, provoked a revival of historical studies. “Pharamond! Pharamond! We fought with the sword… “The war song of the Franks, like another Marseillaise, had prelude to the awakening of the lost generations. To love the past, to see it, to reproduce it with the movement and the colors of life, is the ambition of romantic historians. The archival documents will give an Augustin Thierry (1795-1856) and a Michelet (1798-1874) facts, dates, actors; their imagination and their hearts will give them life, recreate their atmosphere, restore their setting. The history of the conquest of the (1825) is indeed the statement of the facts relative to this conquest, but it is also “an immense clamor of fierce joy in the camp of the conquerors, the muffled murmur of the victims that the contemporaries had hardly heard and whose echo Through the ages, mysteriously reverberates to the writer “(De Crozals).

Attempt to conventional reaction
In the theater, the romantic drama reigns supreme: Vigny played the Maréchale d’Ancre in July 1830 and Chatterton in 1835; Alexandre Dumas gives Antony in 1831; Hugo especially is inexhaustible: Marion Delorme, played brilliantly in 1831, succeeds the king has fun (1832), the King has fun, Lucretia Borgia, Marie Tudor, Angelo, Ruy Blas; nothing seemed to interrupt such a fruitful and brilliant career.

Suddenly, in 1843, a fairly violent classical reaction broke out. A young man, François Ponsard, sent for the Odeon a classic tragedy, Lucretia, a solid, naive piece, written in a heavy style, but frank and healthy. The author had neither weakened nor adorned his subject; he had not decked him with any false picturesque; he had preserved to his primitive Romans their togas of white wool. Lucretia was chosen by the opponents of the romantics to oppose the Burgraves that Victor Hugo was playing at the Theater-French. A cabal whistled this last work and applauded his rival, so that the Burgraves experienced a real failure.

The destinies of the romantic drama
After the Burgraves, the romantics were no longer able to bring their drama to life. At least they managed to prevent the tragedy from living. Ponsard did not go to school; even his other tragedies, Agnes de Meranie and Charlotte Corday, fell from a deep fall. In spite of all her talent, Rachel did not manage to support at the Théâtre Français a single new tragedy. When we returned to tragedy, it was to that of Corneille and Racine; Voltaire himself had sunk into romantic turmoil.

Bourgeois comedy took the place of the historical drama. The movement began in the 18th century by the appearance of tearful comedy and drama of bourgeois Diderot was repeated in 1850, where Augier and Dumas son, wrapping a moral argument in an accurate painting of contemporary manners, create the drama, only as truly living the drama at the 19th century.

End of Romanticism
Around 1850, there are no more classics. The echoes of the romantic battle have been silent for a long time now, Lamartine is condemned to give to live the “copy” to the publishers; Musset no longer produces; Vigny has not published any verse since his first collection. Without adversaries and without rivals, Victor Hugo reigns alone; it prolongs romanticism by a quarter of a century. The Empire, which made him throw himself out of France, furnished him with the subject of the Chatiments (1853), a powerful explosion of lyrical satire; the Contemplations(1856), copious outpouring of individualist poetry, offer all varieties of emotions and intimate thoughts; The Legend of the Centuries (1859, 1877, 1883) collects and unites all the previous work.

Behind this magnificent display, poetry is transformed, and at the same time as all literature. The time of passionate excitement is over; poetry ceases to be exclusively personal; it impregnates itself with a scientific mind, and seeks to render general conceptions of intelligence rather than the sentimental accidents of individual life. The direction of inspiration escapes the heart; it is taken up by the mind, which makes an effort to get out of oneself and to grasp some stable form. Vigny reappears, but it is precisely to teach to erase the ego and the peculiarity of the intimate experience (the Destinies, 1864, posthumous work). The passionate egotism of romanticism is dead by what replaces it.

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