FRENCH LITERATURE: COMPLETING THE 19TH CENTURY

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 (185270), 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, Thophile Gautier sought a new direction for lyric poetry by linking idealism with aesthetics. From the first edition of maux et cames (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).