PREFACE.

I

THE object of the present work is to give some idea of a school or period of literary history as well as space and the character of the classes for which the book is intended will permit. Selections from the works of members of the Romantic School have been previously edited, but I believe no attempt has been made before to group the principal writers and give a picture of the movement. have been obliged to omit entirely the drama (which was not the strong point of the Romantic School) and all the precursors of the movement, even those like Nodier and Beyle (Stendhal), who might perhaps be reckoned as members of the school. I have, however, by these omissions, been able to give something more than the brief extracts of French readers. The selections here presented are in many cases complete works, and long enough to give a fair idea of the writer's style.

As my hope has been to awaken an interest in the study of literary history, I have given a number

of extracts of the nature of documents (the prefaces to Hugo's works, Musset's Lettres de Dupuis et Cotonet, Gautier's account of the first performance of Hernani, etc.), which will make very clear the aims and phases of the school.

The chronological limit which I have set myself is from 1824 to 1848; the former is the date of the preface to Hugo's Odes et Ballades, which may be taken as the beginning of his Romanticism, in theory at least; the latter date is that of the Revolution which ended the reign of Louis Philippe, within which falls the period of the greatest activity of the school and the reaction against it. I have not observed this limit strictly, having admitted an extract from one of Hugo's early novels, Han d'Islande (1823), and three extracts from Gautier : one, the account of the first representation of Hernani, was published in 1874, after the writer's death, but is inserted as a document; the other two are poems, published in 1852, but which may have been written earlier.

It may be objected that by this limit all account of the later activity of Hugo is excluded. This is true, but my purpose has been to exhibit not the individual writer but the school. In this particular case Hugo's career as a Romanticist was really completed when he wrote Hernani (1830) and Notre-Dame de Paris (1831). The only thing I

should care to cite after these is the incomparable Légende des Siècles, in which Romantic versification. attained its perfection.

The book is intended for those who have already been made acquainted with the ordinary grammatical difficulties of the French language, and the notes are confined almost exclusively to the explanation of literary and biographical questions. I have, however, noticed unusual grammatical difficulties, and referred to the excellent French Syntax of Prof. J. A. Harrison (Philadelphia, J. E. Potter & Co., 1886) and the equally admirable treatise on the Subjunctive Mood, by Prof. A. Williams (Boston, Schoenhof, 1885), two works which should be in the hands of all advanced students of French.

The Introduction lays no claim to being an æsthetic essay, but attempts merely to indicate the various lines of influence and phases of the Romantic School, which, under the guidance of the teacher and with the aid of the list of works to consult, the student can investigate more fully at his leisure.

The editor will feel amply repaid for the labor bestowed upon this work, if it shall interest the student first in literature, and then in literary history, and lead him to see that the most remote epochs of French literature are logically connected, that he cannot appreciate the revolution wrought by Hernani without reading the tragedies of Cor

neille, that Horace is only intelligible when something is known of the Renaissance and the imitation of Latin models, that before "Malherbe came" there was an extensive medieval literature, that French literature has been influenced by, and has powerfully influenced Italian, Spanish, German, and English, and, finally, that the best preparation for an understanding of the language and literature of France is a knowledge of the language and literature on which they ultimately rest-those of Rome. T. F. CRANE.

ITHACA, N. Y., Nov. 27, 1886.

INTRODUCTION.

§ I. THE literary movement in France during the first half of the present century, which found its expression in the Romantic School, was a revolt against the canons of taste established in the XVII. century. Some account of the mode in which these canons were imposed upon French writers, and the modifications they effected in French literature, will be necessary in order to appreciate the Romantic movement.

The French, in common with other peoples of Latin extraction, had during the middle ages a flourishing national literature reaching back to the X. century and representing every form of composition in prose and verse. This literature was developed organically out of the elements which were brought into a state of fusion by the German conquest (A.D. 410-510) of the Latin province of Gaul, the Latin element having been already modified to some extent by the original Celtic inhabitants of the province. The resultant French literature, arising at a time when the knowledge of Greek