ROMANTICISM
About 1830 the Caveau Genevois broke up. Some of its members were dead,
some had left Geneva, some were growing too old for poetry, and some
were going in for politics. But as the old school faded away, a new
school--the Romantic School--was dawning. Poets arose who acknowledged
Lamartine for their father and Victor Hugo for their elder brother.
They are not really important, but Marc Monnier, in ‘Genève et ses
Poètes,’ has made them intensely interesting. The greatest poet among
them was Etienne Gide, Professor of Law at the University. Most
students of French poetry have by heart that song of his which runs:
‘C’est un frais sentier plein d’une ombre amoureuse,
L’on n’y passait que deux en se tenant la main;
Nous le suivions ensemble en la saison heureuse,
Mais je n’ai plus dès lors retrouvé ce chemin.
‘C’est qu’il faut être deux pour ce pélérinage;
C’est que le frais sentier n’a d’aspect enchanteur,
De gazon et de fleurs, de parfum et d’ombrage,
Qu’alors que sur son cœur on presse un autre cœur.
‘J’ai vu bien des beaux lieus, de bien riantes plages,
Les bords où croît l’olive, où fleurit l’oranger,
Des lacs unis et purs ou passent les nuages,
Des sites merveilleux, charme de l’étranger.
‘Mais en vain j’ai cherché sur cette heureuse terre,
A travers ses vallons, ses bois et ses sentiers;
Je ne l’ai plus revu ce sentier solitaire
Ou deux amants passaient le long des églantiers.
‘C’est que le beaux sentier n’est plus q’une chimère,
Un songe, une ombre vaine, un souvenir chéri;
C’est qu’après le bonheur vient la douleur amère,
Que la source était vive et que l’onde a tari.
‘C’est que la feuille tombe et que la flamme baisse,
Qu’aux roses sur nos fronts succède le linceul,
Que notre cœur s’attache et qu’après il delaisse,
C’est que l’on était deux et que l’on reste seul.
‘Qui de nous, du passé refaisant le voyage,
Ne voit en souvenir, à travers le chemin,
Quelque désert fleuri, quelque paisible ombrage.
Ou le bonheur s’assit auprès du pélerin.
‘Au désert de la vie, oasis fortunées,
Deux souvenirs épars dans l’ombre de nos jours,
Astres qui vont baissant au déclin des années,
Mais dont l’éclat lointain nous enchante toujours.’
[Illustration: NERNIER, HTE. SAVOIE]
Another notable man--more notable as a man than a poet--was Petit-Senn,
who lived to a patriarchal age and was a member of all the
literary groups in succession. He is sometimes spoken of as a Genevan
Voltaire; and he resembled Voltaire in living a little way out of
the town, yet in touch with its intellectual life, and receiving
the homage of a constant stream of admiring pilgrims; but he is
even better entitled to be styled the Genevan Mæcænas. Possessed of
something more than a modest competence, he opened his purse freely
to the poorer poets, not only relieving their necessities, but paying
for the publication of their works. His ‘Miliciade’--a satire on the
amateurishness of the Genevan army--had an immense success when he gave
a reading of it in a concert-hall; and his ‘Bluettes et Boutades’ are
short sentences generally worthy of being ranked with epigrams. We may
cull a few of them:
‘In the eyes of the world, however one may have made one’s money,
one has done better than if one had lost it.
‘The egoist weeps over the story of a shipwreck at the reflection
that he might himself have been on board.
‘We are more ready to do justice to the dead than to the absent.
‘Some of the sins of youth are so agreeable that age repents of
them only in order to have an excuse for recalling them.
‘When a friend asks you for money, consider which of the two you
would rather lose.
‘The most lucrative kind of commerce would be to buy men at their
real value, and sell them at their own valuation.
‘If hypocrisy were to die, modesty would, at least, have to go into
half-mourning.
‘Let us respect white hairs ... especially our own.’
Petit-Senn and Etienne Gide were the poets who remained in their city.
It is characteristic of Genevan literary history that the others sought
their fortune abroad. _Trop grand poisson pour notre petit lac_ was
presumably their motto, though they were not fish who cut any very
striking figure in the lakes to which they repaired. Charles Didier
was the one of them who succeeded best. He took long walking tours in
Italy, glorified the carbonari, pictured the meetings of their secret
societies in the style of ‘The Mysteries of Udolpho,’ and ultimately
acquired something of a literary position in Paris, where he was
numbered among the friends of George Sand. Imbert Galloix also went
to Paris, but fell into destitution there. Nodier helped him. ‘I send
you,’ he wrote, ‘the half of what I have in the house. It is the first
time that I blush for my poverty.’ Petit-Senn also sent him money, for
which he appealed in a very pathetic letter; but he died--a pitiful
figure, reminding one of Chatterton--at the age of twenty-one. Others
of the company were Henri Blanvalet, who for twenty years was private
tutor to the Frankfort Rothschilds--truly a sorry position for a poet;
and André Verre, who went to Russia to teach in a girls’ school, and
ultimately edited a newspaper in Buenos Ayres. None of them count. They
were merely echoes of the louder voices heard in the French _cénacle_.