Completing the 19th century: from 1850 to 1900 Literature in the second half of the 19th century continued a natural expansion of trends already established in the first half. Intellectuals and artists remained acutely aware of the same essential problems: the nature of man, his relationship with the universe, the guarantees of morality, the pursuit of beauty, and the duties of the artist. But as writers became progressively alienated from the official culture of the Second Empire (1852-70), the forms of their revolt became more and more disparate. While the principles of Positivism were easily assimilated to the materialist pragmatism of the developing capitalist society, even many rationalist thinkers were drawn to forms of Idealism that placed faith in progress through science; and the antirationalist and antiutilitarian writers diverged into various types of mysticism and aesthetic formalism. New directions in poetry Gautier and l'art pour l'art The greatest changes occurred in poetry. By the end of the 1830s Romantic poetry had narrowed in range, becoming synonymous with the direct expression of personal feelings and ideals in alexandrine verse paragraphs. Turning his back on his own earlier attempts to treat grand themes in the grand manner, Theophile Gautier sought a new direction for lyric poetry by linking idealism with aesthetics. From the first edition of Emaux et camees (1852; "Enamels and Cameos") to the posthumously published Derniers vers (1872), he devoted himself to a form of literary miniature painting, attempting to make something aesthetically valid out of subjects for the most part deliberately chosen for their triviality. The fashion for linking poetry with the plastic arts had grown up during the 1840s. Gautier simply developed the implications of this trend to the ultimate, concentrating on the language of shape, colour, and texture and limiting form almost exclusively to the very restrictive octosyllabic quatrain. Even themes that in his prose fiction suggest a genuine spiritual unrest, such as the fluid nature of identity or the destructive power of love, become the occasion for virtuoso ornamental elaboration. Many of the poems are stylized, sometimes ironic, treatments of amatory themes; others play with images of everyday life; but the best are transpositions from one art form to another, particularly those based on music ("Symphonie en blanc majeur," "Variations sur le Carnaval de Venise," and "Contralto"). Leconte de Lisle and Parnassianism Gautier's cult of form is also to be met in the work of Theodore de Banville, notably in Les Stalactites (1846) and Les Odes funambulesques (1857). But the reaction against the expression of personal emotion in rambling rhetorical verse was not confined to the formalism of the l'art pour l'art poets. Charles-Marie-Rene Leconte de Lisle, who came to be labelled the founder of Parnassianism, took a different approach in his Poemes antiques (1852), Poemes barbares (1862), and Poemes tragiques (1884). Although his theoretical pronouncements about the supremacy of beauty suggest affinities with Gautier, Leconte de Lisle was far from believing that the subject matter of poetry was of no significance. He wanted his poetry to transmute knowledge into a higher form of truth, and he believed in the necessity of systematic research prior to composition. The highly material surface of his poems is used to disguise deeply felt nihilistic metaphysical beliefs. For Leconte de Lisle the history of mankind presented a long, slow decline from the golden age of antiquity, leading inevitably toward the cosmic annihilation that post-Darwinian biologists saw as the natural end of evolution. The stories recounted from European and Oriental mythology, and the portraits of exotic animals and landscapes, though superficially scientific in their blending of scholarly documentation and objective narrative manner, all distill the same sense of revolt against a destiny that binds mankind to expiate crimes it is fated to commit. The style of the poems is not in fact concerned with the transcription of surfaces: the physical details are used to create moods that form symbolic analogues for the philosophical ideas. Leconte de Lisle's ostensible manner and matter were taken up with enthusiasm by younger contemporaries. But only Les Trophees (Eng. trans., Les Trophees; "The Trophies"), the exquisitely miniaturist sonnets of Jose Maria de Heredia, written over a quarter of a century but not published until 1893, are still read, and even these have an appeal more like that of Meissen china fruit than the emotional or intellectual force normally associated with poetry. Baudelaire It is significant that Gautier, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle were the three contemporary French poets for whom Charles Baudelaire felt the greatest admiration, although he had no time for formalism, didacticism, or the cult of antiquity. Antithetical in all things, Baudelaire was torn between the desire to express a metaphysical anguish more urgent and subjective than that of the Romantics and an aesthetic conviction that the effectiveness of art depended on precision and control. It is as misguided to look for consistency in Baudelaire's critical works (L'Art romantique, Curiosites esthetiques, both published posthumously in 1868) as in his poetry, since his ideas evolved constantly and in some cases radically throughout his most creative period (1845-64). To two basic ideas, however, he remained constant: that only the artist can create meaning out of the raw material of life, and that the material world is irredeemably corrupted by original sin. The first of these is responsible for the importance which he assigns to intuition, imagination, synesthesia, and the necessity for the artist to plunge himself into the world about him. The second led him to an impasse: the artist could only rise above material corruption through the creative act, but the creative act could not occur without the stimulus of corrupt reality. Baudelaire was accordingly a poet deeply concerned with the relationship between morality and art, which he located in the effective transposition of the artist's special perceptions of the world, and he was genuinely distressed by the official condemnation of the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1857; The Flowers of Evil) on a charge of obscenity provoked by its supposed erotic realism. The tensions within Baudelaire reached their height in the second edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1861). The collection is loosely structured to present a "self" who struggles to transcend the limitations of the material world. The struggle is presented in a series of experiences that start with love (mostly physical), move out into the ugly urban environment of contemporary Paris, and gradually descend through increasingly vicious experiences until only death offers the possibility of new stimulus sufficient to keep the creative consciousness of the poet-hero alive. The stylistic antitheses mirror the content. Within individual poems Baudelaire shifts between the rhetorical, the impressionist, the abstract, and the intensely physical. He balances banality and originality, the prosaic and the melodic, to emphasize the eternal interdependence of opposites, which he sees as the essence of man's condition. In the last years of his life Baudelaire tried to extend the literary means at his disposal by experimenting with prose poetry. The range of themes in the posthumously edited Petits poemes en prose is similar to that of Les Fleurs du mal, though the balance is different: urban landscapes, the ambiguous relationship of artist and crowd, and the degradations of poverty are given more space than is love. The relative freedom of the prose form allowed more shifts of tone; the juxtaposition of the ironic and the lyrical; and the interweaving of anecdote, narrative, and reflection. The best poems, such as "La Chambre double," make a positive use of this new freedom. The later poetry of Victor Hugo It comes as a shock to realize that though the second half of the 19th century is habitually treated as a period of reaction against Romanticism, nearly all the major poetry of Hugo was, in fact, published after 1850. The three collections Les Chatiments (1853), Les Contemplations (1856), and La Legende des siecles (1859, 1877, 1883) are linked by their epic quality. Different as they are in content, intention, and tone (though less varied in style), each is loosely structured to create an overall unity. Les Chatiments, written from exile in the Channel Islands and published clandestinely, is a hymn of hate against the mediocrity, callousness, and greed of Louis-Napoleon and the society of the Second Empire, interspersed with outbursts of compassion for the poor and oppressed. The poems are arranged so as to emphasize the darkness of the present and the light of the future, as Hugo proclaims his optimistic belief in the eventual triumph of peace, liberty, and social justice. Though the most monotonous of the three great works in content, it is the most varied in style, as if to offset the repetitiousness of the invective. In contrast to this political saga, Les Contemplations embodies Hugo's philosophical attitudes. It presents the poet as seer, penetrating the mysteries of creation and recounting the metaphysical truths perceived. The first four books contain much nature poetry, elegy, and love lyrics. The portentous and obscure rhetorical enumerations of the later visionary sections have dated beyond recall. La Legende des siecles reveals the same urge to play the prophet. The poems are a series of historical and mythological narratives, borrowing some of the scientific spirit that informed Leconte de Lisle's work but with none of the same attention to preliminary scholarly research. Together they form an account of the history of human existence as Hugo saw it. After the three epic cycles Hugo returned to writing short lyrics on personal themes (Les Chansons des rues et des bois [1865; "Songs of the Streets and the Forests"]; L'Art d'etre grand-pere [1877; "The Art of Being a Grandfather"]), although he never abandoned his role as didactic poet, as the collections churned out in the 1880s testify. Realism in the novel Diversity among the Realist school The label Realism came to be applied to literature by way of painting as a result of the controversy surrounding the work of Gustave Courbet in the early 1850s. Courbet's realism consisted in the emotionally neutral presentation of a slice of life chosen for its ordinariness rather than for any intrinsic beauty. Literary realism, however, was a much less easily definable concept. Hence the loose use of the term in the late 1850s, when it was applied to works as various as Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Baudelaire's Fleurs du mal, and the social dramas of Alexandre Dumas fils. Even the members of the so-called Realist school were not entirely in agreement. Edmond Duranty, cofounder of the monthly journal Realisme (1856), supported the view that novels should be written in a plain style about the ordinary lives of middle- or lower-class people, but he insisted that the Realists' main aim should be to serve a social purpose. Jules-Francois-Felix Husson (known as Champfleury), an art critic and novelist, stressed the need for careful research and documentation and rejected any element of moral intention. The practice of those labelled Realists was even more diverse than their theory. The writers who most fully realized Champfleury's ideal of a documentary presentation of the day-to-day, Edmond and Jules Goncourt, were also the most concerned with that aesthetic perfection of style which Duranty and Champfleury rejected in practice as well as in principle. In the Goncourts' six jointly written novels that appeared in the 1860s, and in four further novels written by Edmond Goncourt after his brother's death, plot is reduced to a minimum and the interest of the novel is divided equally between stylistic bravura and the minutely documented portrayal of a milieu or a psychological state--the upbringing of a middle-class girl in Renee Mauperin (1864), or the degenerating life-style of a female servant in Germinie Lacerteux (1864; Germinie). Gustave Flaubert The problem with the Realists was that each had his own definition of reality and his own recipe for how to transcribe it. It is easy to see why Gustave Flaubert was so firm in dissociating himself from such writers as Champfleury and Duranty, given that his own work undermined all sense of stability in perceptions and values by emphasizing the idea that reality is relative to the person who perceives it. Furthermore, Flaubert rejected any idea of transposing a slice of life onto the page in everyday language. For him, only art could give meaning to the raw material provided by the external world, and only through art could language be lifted above the emptiness of its everyday function so as to record objectively the author's perception of the world. Flaubert's juvenilia, of which the first version of L'Education sentimentale (1845) is the most important work, show the writer's struggle to control his own instinctive idealism and to find a way of reconciling his belief in the primacy of facts with his rejection of contemporary petty materialism. His fascination with escapism and Romantic excess was to reappear in Salammbo (1863; Salambo) and La Tentation de Saint-Antoine (1874; The Temptation of Saint Anthony), in which he portrayed exotic subjects in a heightened lyrical fashion. But his major novels, Madame Bovary (1857) and L'Education sentimentale (1870; Sentimental Education) show trivial lives frittered away in hopeless attempts to transcend the banality and dishonesty of the modern world. Emma Bovary destroys herself by taking empty abstractions--passion, happiness--as concrete absolutes, and by attempting to base her life on such concepts. In her efforts to make the world (and more specifically the men) around her fit her preco nceived image, she ignores the nature of material reality itself, as symbolized by money, and is inexorably drawn onward to financial ruin and suicide. Emma's own mediocrity is matched by that of the provincial society in which she lives, and her illusory view is paralleled by the various illusions entertained by almost all the major characters. Most of these, however, like the apothecary Homais, realize that the way to succeed in life is to accept the official values promoted as absolute by the ruling bourgeoisie. L'Education sentimentale extends the study to cover the entire "generation of 1848," showing how all emotional, artistic, and social ideals are corroded by contact with reality. Its central character, Frederic Moreau, is a passive version of Emma, and the symbolism of money gives way to that of prostitution--the sale of love, talent, and principle. In his Trois contes (1877; Three Tales) Flaubert approached the same beliefs from the opposite angle, showing how the withdrawal from reality of the ascetic or saint, exemplified by Felicite, the simple servant in "Un Coeur simple," St. Julian in "La Legende de Saint-Julien l'Hospitalier," and John the Baptist in "Herodias," when coupled with the metaphysical aspirations central to Christian belief, offers a form of supreme illusion that the material world cannot touch. In all these works, and in his unfinished satirical novel, Bouvard et Pecuchet (published posthumously in 1881; Bouvard and Pecuchet), Flaubert returns consistently to the problem of communication. He was haunted by the way in which the conventional language of love, literature, journalism, politics, and science pretends to portray a fixed reality while in fact concealing the subjectivity of all perceptions. His obsessive reworking of every sentence that he wrote was motivated by the desire to create a style that would preserve the meaninglessness of "reality" while justifying by its own beauty the existence of the novels. Drama after 1850 The society of the Second Empire, and indeed that of the early decades of the Third Republic, was not fond of seeing itself too accurately portrayed on the stage; yet at the same time, in reaction against the escapism and nonconformity of Romantic drama, its members wanted the stage to reflect contemporary values and preoccupations. Hence the predominance, from 1850 to 1890, of social drama on the one hand and light comedy, farce, and operetta on the other. Social drama, denied the use of political issues by censorship, confined itself to the tension between new money and old social position, the morality of financial speculation, and the threat to family life posed by extramarital sexual relationships--all themes touched upon previously in light comedy (e.g., the plays of Eugene Scribe). The settings and character types related to the audience's milieu; hence the plays were considered to be realistic at the time, although their sentimentality, black-and-white morality, and melodramatic tu rns of plot make them seem highly artificial in modern terms. The major writers of social drama were Alexandre Dumas fils and Emile Augier, both of whom began by describing society and ended by prescribing for it. Dumas fils is best remembered for his romanticization of the courtesan in La Dame aux camelias (1848), the novel and play on which the libretto of Giuseppe Verdi's La Traviata was based, but the moralizing Les Idees de Mme Aubray (1867), with its plea for the social redemption of repentant fallen women, is more typical of his major works. Augier's morality was more solidly conservative than was Dumas's, as can be seen from one of his best known plays, Le Mariage d'Olympe (1855), which not only proposes that what makes a woman into a prostitute in the first place is an innate propensity to vice, but also suggests that if a fallen woman insinuates herself into a respectable family it is legitimate to shoot her. On the other hand, Augier's treatment of the venality of the press and the corruption of financiers in Les Effrontes (1861) is as trenchant and effective as comparable portraits in the Naturalist novelists. Light comedy and farce similarly relied upon a thin layer of contemporary social relevance, with marriage, the menage a trois, and the pretensions of the lower middle class as the main subjects. In farce, in particular, social criticism passed from being an end to a means. Although the characters found themselves in situations in which events followed a nightmare logic quite at odds with their own stereotyped realism and revealed the potential irrelevance of their vaunted rationality, the return to sanity at the end of the plays confirmed the audience's assumption that the world would ultimately always conform to expected and accepted standards. The classic examples of the genre are the plays of Eugene-Marin Labiche, notably Le Chapeau de paille d'Italie (1851; The Italian Straw Hat) and Le Voyage de M. Perrichon (1860). When their taste ventured into something more literary, Second Empire audiences were obliged to look to the fantastical comedies of Alfred de Musset, written 30 years earlier but not staged until the 1850s and '60s. In light comedy proper and costume drama the leading figure of the age was Bernard Shaw's bugbear, Victorien Sardou. But the most successful genre of all was undoubtedly operetta, in particular the absurd comedies of the collaborators Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halevy. Main examples of their work, set to music by Offenbach, are La Belle Helene (1865), La Vie parisienne (1866), and La Grande-Duchesse de Gerolstein (1867). It is a reflection on the society of the day that La Belle Helene, in which a frivolous pastiche of classical legend is spiced by an acute satire on the manners, morals, and values of the court of Napoleon III, was the nearest thing to political satire that the French stage could boast for 20 years. The Franco-German War and the consequent collapse of the empire had little perceptible effect on mainline theatre. Offenbach lost favour because of his German associations, but Augier, Dumas, and Sardou continued to flourish. Attempts by other writers (Flaubert, the Goncourts, Zola) to establish a more genuinely realistic form of theatre failed, partly because public taste and theatrical commercialism made experiment nearly impossible, and partly because the plays written were either theatrically unsatisfying or lost much of their realism in reworking novels for the stage. The only effective Naturalist dramatist was Henry-Francois Becque, whose Les Corbeaux (The Vultures), first performed in 1882, and La Parisienne (1885; Parisienne), without completely ridding themselves of the structural formulas of the well-made play, came nearer than any other drama of the period to portraying brief moments in ordinary lives. That Becque owed his success to Andre Antoine, the founder and director of th e Theatre Libre (1887-96), is symptomatic of the way in which literary theatre in the last decades of the century was largely dependent on small-scale directorial experimentation. Antoine aimed at creating a unity between the staging (decor and acting style) of a play and its content, in the interest of total realism. From 1891 Paul Fort, founder of the Theatre d'Art, and his successor, Aurelian-Francois-Marie Lugne-Poe, who restyled the company as the Theatre de l'Oeuvre, applied Antoine's principles to the creation of antinaturalistic theatre. It was these little experimental companies that principally staged Symbolist plays, notably the works of Maurice Maeterlinck, with their emphasis on the suggestion of forces beyond reality and of meaning which lies beyond the explicit surface of language. But the audiences for L'Intruse, Les Aveugles, and Pelleas et Melisande were small and select, and the significance of such theatrical innovation only became felt more widely in the following cent ury. Naturalism The argument for the existence of a Naturalist school of writing depends on the joint publication, in 1880, of Les Soirees de Medan, a volume of short stories by Emile Zola, Guy de Maupassant, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Henry Ceard, Leon Hennique, and Paul Alexis. But it is doubtful whether Naturalism can justifiably be regarded as more than an extension of the methods of interpreting reality already in vogue. The Naturalists purported to take a more scientifically analytical approach to the presentation of reality than had their predecessors, treating dissection as a prerequisite for description. Hence Zola's attachment to the term naturalisme, borrowed from Hippolyte Taine, the Positivist philosopher who claimed for literary criticism the status of a branch of psychology. Unfortunately, it is difficult to find a coherent expose of the Naturalist theoretical position. Zola's work notes are understandably fragmentary, and his public statements about the novel are all distorted by their polemical purpose--particularly the notorious essay "Le Roman experimental" (1880; "The Experimental Novel"), in which he developed the untenable parallel between the methods of the novelist and of the experimental scientist. An examination of the views held in common by Zola, Maupassant, and Huysmans indicates that the basis of Naturalism can best be defined as the careful study of a given environment, the application of a mechanistic theory of psychology, and the rejection of any sort of idealism or escapism. However, like Flaubert the Naturalists did not see reality as fixed: Zola and Maupassant accepted as inevitable the transposition of reality through the temperament of the individual writer. Emile Zola The common points of Naturalist practice are even more elusive than their theory. Zola's Naturalism depends on the extensive documentation that he undertook prior to the writing of each novel. This extensiveness is emphasized by the subtitle of his 20-novel cycle Les Rougon-Macquart: Histoire naturelle et sociale d'une famille sous le second Empire (Natural and Social History of a Family Under the Second Empire). The linking of so many novels through a single family and the emphasis on the deterministic effects of heredity and environment confirm the scientific purpose. Zola's canvas is broader than Flaubert's, or even Balzac's: he handles subjects as diverse as a miners' strike in Germinal (1885; Eng. trans., Germinal), working-class alcoholism in L'Assommoir (1877; Eng. trans., L'Assommoir; "The Drunkard"), the sexual decadence of the upper classes in La Curee (1872; The Kill) and Nana (1880; Eng. trans., Nana), and the ferocious attachment of the peasantry to their land in La Terre (188 7; Earth). But there are countless examples of manipulation of facts, particularly in the chronology of the novels, which show that for Zola documentary accuracy was not paramount. Indeed, his work notes reveal that he saw the scientific principles underlying the novels as a literary device to hold them together and thus strengthen the personal vision of reality that they contained. The sense of period and family unity is soon submerged, as Zola becomes both poet and moralist in his portrayal of contemporary values. All the major novels are dominated by symbolically anthropomorphized forces that control and destroy both individual and mass. Thus the mine in Germinal is represented as a voracious beast devouring those who work in it. This tendency to symbolism can be seen in an even more extreme form in the reinterpretation of the Genesis story in La Faute de l'abbe Mouret (1875; "The Transgression of Abbe Mouret"; Eng. trans., The Sinful Priest). As the cycle progresses, the sense of a doo med society rushing toward the Apocalypse grows, and it is indeed confirmed in the penultimate novel, on the Franco-German War, La Debacle (1892; The Debacle). The trilogy Les Trois Villes ("The Three Cities") and the unfinished tetralogy Les Quatres Evangiles ("The Four Gospels"), which followed Les Rougon-Macquart, became progressively more didactic, laying bare the obsessions with scientific progress, socialist humanitarianism, and the rejection of Roman Catholicism, which had been present in a concealed form in the earlier novels. Zola's contribution to French life after Les Rougon-Macquart lay more in his spirited intervention in the Dreyfus Affair than in what Henry James justifiably called Zola's "nursery moralities." Guy de Maupassant Of the other Naturalists only Maupassant is widely read, though Ceard's Une Belle Journee (1881) and the four early novels of Huysmans, particularly A vau-l'eau (1882; Down Stream), have been unjustly neglected. Maupassant had the advantage of being a protege of Flaubert, but his style is markedly less detached than his master's. Many of his short stories, whether set in Normandy or Paris, rely on sharply reductive, satirical techniques directed against his favourite targets--women, the middle classes, the Prussians--and designed to bring out hypocrisy and dishonesty as the central forces in human life. His novels achieve a greater sense of detachment and are truer to the aim expressed in his essay "Le Roman" (1887; "The Novel") to "write the history of the heart, soul and mind in their normal state." There is a progression in manner and matter from Une Vie (1883; A Woman's Life), with its echoes of Madame Bovary, through the detached but destructive portrait of the worlds of journalism an d finance in Bel-Ami (1885; Eng. trans., Bel-Ami) to powerful evocation of the crippling effects of jealousy in Pierre et Jean (1888; Eng. trans., Pierre et Jean). His mastery of the psychological novel is confirmed by his portrait of the effects of old age on a pair of lovers in Fort comme la mort (1889; The Master Passion), and his considerable skill in presenting broader social forces at work is evident in his analysis of a small spa in Mont-Oriol (1887), which is reminiscent of Zola's work. The reaction against reason In the last decades of the century, particularly from 1880 onward, the opposition intensified between those creative writers who built their ideals around the material world and those who rejected physical experience as meaningless in itself. Whereas Baudelaire and Flaubert incorporated elements of both attitudes into their writings, the poets and novelists who followed them tended to take one or the other line to an extreme: hence the emergence within a short time of movements as disparate as Naturalism, Decadence, Symbolism, and the Roman Catholic Revival. The Decadents: Verlaine and Laforgue Decadence was a movement primarily associated with poetry but whose psychological basis is well illustrated in Huysmans' novel A rebours (1884; Against the Grain) and the Culte du moi trilogy (1888-91) by Maurice Barres. It derives from the same extreme deterministic philosophy as Naturalism and has much in common aesthetically with Impressionism in that it isolates subjectively perceived moments of meaningless physical experience. The impetus to decadent poetry came partly from the study of Baudelaire and partly from the work of Paul Verlaine. Though much of his early poetry imitated the work of Baudelaire and the Parnassians, in the Fetes galantes (1869), a group of pastiches, and his major collection, Romances sans paroles (1974; "Songs Without Words"), Verlaine created the blend of musicality, physical atmospherics, and sense of psychological distortion that constituted his greatest poetic achievement. In so doing, he used impair (odd) metres, ambiguous syntax, and unusual collocations of abstract and concrete concepts in a way that radically advanced the technical range of French verse. In Verlaine's work two impressions predominate: that only the self is important, and that the function of poetry is to preserve moments of extreme sensation and unique impression. These were the features, together with the experiments in form, on which the younger generation of poets seized in the 1880s. Hence the founding of the review Le Decadent in 1886, whose title consecrated a label originally coined by hostile critics. The poetic movement found its best exponent in Jules Laforgue, who brought together a subjectivism and pessimism fed by his studies in contemporary German philosophy and a genius for harnessing effects of poetic contrast. His first two published collections, Les Complaintes (1885) and L'Imitation de Notre-Dame la Lune (1886), are a series of variations on the themes of the flight from life, woman, and ennui, each explored through a host of frequently recurring images (e.g., the wind, Sundays, the stock comic figure Pierrot). The conscious intellectual antitheses of th e first collection are reduced in the second and disappear entirely in the Dernier vers (1890), in which the orchestrated cycle of recurrent images embodies the meaninglessness of life rather than explains it. To match these tenuous thematic patterns Laforgue used a fluid verse form shaped by rhythmic patterns and assonance, the first important example of free verse in French poetry. Symbolism: Rimbaud and Mallarme The distinction between Decadence and Symbolism is surprisingly slight, although it should ostensibly be a distinction between the acceptance of the idea that life is meaningless and a mystical belief in meanings that transcend reality. But the principal Symbolist poets were not in a conventional sense metaphysicians, and their search for transcendence derived from a subjectivity as intense as that of Verlaine and Laforgue. The narrowness of the distinction is well illustrated by the case of Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud's poetic creed is generally taken to be contained in two letters of 1871, in which he prescribes for the poet the need to explore the inner self, reorder perceptions of existence, and thereby become a visionary. The fiercely ironic view of contemporary society that emerges from his early poems reveals in him an element of the political revolutionary. The dreamlike poem "Le Bateau ivre" ("The Drunken Boat") and the poems written during the period of his infatuation with Verlaine (the so-called "last poems") show a more far-reaching revolution in the interpretation of reality, using an atmospheric, dislocated style similar to that of Verlaine's Romances sans paroles but with images more surreal and formal experiments more radical. By 1872 Rimbaud had carried his aesthetic revolution still further in his prose poems Illuminations (probably written from 1872 onward, and published posthumously), in whic h moods of destruction, revolt, elation, liberation, and frustration are suggested through visions that have no logical coherence. Critics are divided as to whether or not Rimbaud's other cycle of prose poems, Une Saison en enfer (1873; A Season in Hell), predated the writing of the last Illuminations. In either case the work reveals Rimbaud's own doubts as to whether his poetic method could create a vision capable of affecting the world outside itself. His loss of confidence in the magical powers of language led to his abandoning literature completely, at or about the age of 19. Stephane Mallarme brought a very different temperament and intellectual background to bear on the problem of the inadequacies of the material world. While both Rimbaud and Mallarme believed in the special power of language, Rimbaud's vision was centred on life, Mallarme's on death. His early poems, such as "L'Azur" ("Azure") and "Les Fenetres" ("The Windows"), reveal a man haunted by the awareness of a transcendent reality that he cannot attain and that frightens him. An intellectual and spiritual crisis in 1867 led him to a final acceptance of death as the only inevitability in life. But while this fact negated his personal significance, he found in it a new value for the products of his mind. Only the world of literature, born of the writer's imagination and fixed in the creative medium of language, was unassailable by the forces of chance. A meaning for life could only be found, therefore, in art. Ironically, although until his death Mallarme pursued the vision of writing his Grand Oeuv re, he in fact published very little: the Poesies (1887), a handful of prose poems and essays, an unfinished prose drama, and "Un Coup de des jamais n'abolira le hasard" (1897; "A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance"). Though Mallarme's philosophical crisis is important as an explanation of why he came to write as he did, his place in the history of poetry depends more on the techniques he evolved in the pursuit of his ideals. In the effort to escape from the limitation of surface reality, he came more and more to depend on elaborate techniques of evocation and suggestion. And in his desire to assert a God-like creative role he exercised tight control over all the formal elements of his verse--the very opposite of Rimbaud's experiments in liberation. As early as L'Apres-midi d'un faune (1876; "The Afternoon of a Faun"; later interpreted musically by Claude Debussy) he concentrated on multiplicity of meaning: even a reductive reading of the poem has to see it as simultaneously the dream evocation of the faun's erotic desires and a meditation upon the creative impulse at an abstract level. The later "Prose (pour des Esseintes)," "Plusieurs sonnets," and "Autres poemes et sonnets" are studies in the possibi lities of language, in which, as in music, recurrent images and antithetical patterns communicate on an emotive level. The curious "Un Coup de des," with its use of the typography to reflect the theme of chance, suggests that ultimately Mallarme, like Rimbaud, felt defeated. He realized that the poet in his pursuit of the absolute via literature could never possess complete mastery of expression, and therefore could never exclude the hazard of random inspiration. His art was thereby reduced to the status of totally subjective self-exploration. Perhaps Huysmans was right to present Mallarme as the ultimate decadent writer in A Rebours. By an irony of literary history Symbolism as a historical movement strictly postdates Mallarme. It derived its name from an article by Jean Moreas, who produced the first manifesto of the movement in 1886. The 1880s and '90s continued to be a period of artistic ferment, which produced many charming poems but no major poets. Musicality, myth, mysticism, and melancholia are the hallmarks of nearly all the best verse of the period and of nearly all the worst. Among those whose works have deservedly survived in anthologies are Henri de Regnier and Francis Viele-Griffin and the Belgian poets Georges Rodenbach and Emile Verhaeren. The novel later in the century The development of the novel in the 1880s reflected the same thirst for absolutes as the new movements in poetry. But neither Decadence (with the exception of A Rebours) nor Symbolism generated prose fiction of lasting significance. There was a recrudescence of the conte fantastique, which found its foremost exponent in Auguste, comte de Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, as in his Contes cruels (1883; Cruel Tales). But the major trends in the novel were connected with the revival of Roman Catholicism and the growth of nationalism in the aftermath of the Franco-German War. The religious spirit was sometimes aesthetic, as in Huysmans' La Cathedrale (1898), sometimes visionary, as in Leon Bloy's Le Desespere (1886) and La Femme pauvre (1897; The Woman Who Was Poor), in which a hysterical attack on bourgeois society is combined with an equally hysterical espousal of the then-fashionable doctrine of vicarious suffering. But the combination of Roman Catholic teaching and right-wing politics in the novels of Paul Bourget, beginning with Le Disciple (1889; "The Disciple"), is more typical of the spirit of the times. The antidemocratic, antirepublican views of Bourget were similar to those found in nationalist writers, notably Maurice Barres. Barres moved from decadent self-absorption to an extreme form of historical determinism. He saw the meaning of the individual as defined by his part in a collective inherited unconscious, which itself was defined by race. His trilogy Le Roman de l'energie nationale, particularly Les Deracines (1897), is an important document for an understanding of the attitudes of the French right during the Dreyfus Affair and between the world wars. The only novelist of note who stood outside all these trends, and yet was a typical offspring of the age that produced them, achieving the double distinction of winning the Nobel Prize for Literature for 1921 and being put on the Index, was Anatole France (pen name of Jacques-Francois-Anatole Thibault). France made his initial reputation as a literary critic and author of psychological novels, but he rapidly became the personification of the pessimism fashionable after Germany's victory over France in 1870, an attitude typically expressed in the detachedly ironic exposure of human weakness in Les Opinions de M. Jerome Coignard and La Rotisserie de la Reine Pedauque (both 1893). The same attitudes pervaded the first three volumes of his Histoire contemporaine, a novel sequence impartially mocking church, right-wing opposition, and corrupt political establishment. But in the fourth volume, Monsieur Bergeret a Paris (1901; Monsieur Bergeret in Paris), France's commitment to the pro-Dreyfus fa ction in the Dreyfus Affair introduced both a more bitter note to his satire and an unaccustomed commitment to positive humanitarian ideals. Like many other Dreyfusards he was to be disillusioned by the aftermath of the affair, a response typified by his extended satire of French society through the ages in L'Ile des Pingouins (1908; Penguin Islands) and his condemnation of fanaticism in his novel on the French Revolution, Les Dieux ont soif (1912; The Gods Are Athirst). |