"Dors-tu content, Voltaire, et ton hideux sourire Voltige-t-il encore sur tes os décharnés? Ton siècle était, dit-on, trop jeune pour te lire; Le nôtre doit te plaire, et tes hommes sont nés. Il est tombé sur nous, cet édifice immense Que de tes larges mains tu sapais nuit et jour. La Mort devait t'attendre avec impatience. Pendant quatre-vingts ans que tu lui fis ta cour. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Vois-tu, vieil Arouet? cet homme plein de vie Qui de baisers ardents couvre ce sein si beau, Sera couché demain dans un étroit tombeau. Jetterais-tu sur lui quelques regards d'envie? Sois tranquille, il fa lu. Rien ne peut lui donner Ni consolation, ni lueur d'espérance." What had Voltaire to do with the death of this contemptible spendthrift. Is the great worker to be held responsible for the suicide of the idle voluptuary? Is this world of fantastic fools and women without wills, the world of which Voltaire dreamed? Voltaire, who was reason incarnate, whose hands, if they were black, were blackened only with gunpowder, whose life was a determined struggle for light? Is all this misery his fault? And if so, why? Because he had no dogmatic faith. The want of dogmatic faith is Rolla's excuse for living like an animal and dying like a boy. See what has become in the course of a few years of the bold defiance with which the poet began his career. The defiance has turned into faint-hearted doubt, the atheism into hopeless despair. How healthy, how determined and calm is Hugo's attitude compared with this! Is it not easy now to understand how, in spite of everything, he continued to hold the central place in French literature? IX DE MUSSET AND GEORGE SAND Ere the Thirties were half over, the literary revolution inaugurated by Hugo and his friends was victorious. This assertion may be made with truth, though the victory was as yet only a spiritual one. A very small minority of the most cultivated men and most intelligent women of France recognised that the battle was decided, that classic tragedy was dead, that the Aristotelian rules were mistakes, that the men of the transition period had had their day, that Casimir Delavigne's vein was exhausted, and that the only literary aspirants who knew their own minds were the generation of 1830. The fact that a movement of exactly the same kind had begun in painting, sculpture, and music showed more plainly than anything else how deep-seated and irresistible the change was.