far wider, and has affected every branch of literary
composition. Nor is it yet exhausted, although more than two generations
have passed since the current was started. As is usual in the later
stages of such things, this influence is in part disguised under the
form of apparent reactions, developments, modifications, and other
eddies or backwaters of the great wave. But as the Romantic movement was
above all things a movement of literary emancipation, it can never be
said to be superseded until fresh chains are imposed on literature. Of
this there is as yet no sign, except in the puerile and disgusting
school of naturalism, a mere scum-flake--to keep up the metaphor--on the
surface of the waters.

[Sidenote: Writers of the later Transition.]

The literature of the Revolution, the Empire, and the early Restoration,
which has been in part already surveyed, displayed the last effete
products of the old classical tradition side by side with the vigorous
but nondescript and tentative efforts at reform of Chateaubriand, Madame
de Stael, Courier, and others. So the first products of the new movement
found themselves side by side with what may be called a second
generation of the transition. The names which chiefly illustrate this
second generation must be dealt with before the Romantics proper are
arrived at. The chief of them are Beranger, Lamartine, Lamennais,
Cousin, Stendhal, Nodier, and the dramatists Alexandre Soumet and
Casimir Delavigne. Most of these, while irresistibly impelled half way
towards the movement, stood aloof from it in feeling and taste; others,
such as Stendhal, exercised upon it an influence not much felt at first,
but deep and lasting; one, Nodier, threw in his lot with it frankly and
decidedly.

[Sidenote: Beranger.]

Pierre Jean de Beranger is one of the most original and not the least
pleasant figures in the long list of French poets. His life, though
long, was comparatively uneventful. Despite the particle of nobility, he
belonged to the middle class, and rather to the lower than to the upper
portion of it; for, if his father was a man of business, his grandfather
was a tailor. He himself lived in his youth with an aunt at Peronne, was
then apprenticed to a printer, and was so ill off that, in 1804, he was
saved from absolute poverty only by the patronage of Lucien Bonaparte,
to whom he had sent some of his verses, and who procured him a small
government clerkship. He held this for some years.