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Letters on Literature-Part12_ANDREW LANG(1844-1912)_English Literature(文学名著)-第2页

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"Heathen Chinee," as tender as the lay of the ship with its crew of

children that slipped its moorings in the fog. To me it seems that



Mr. Bret Harte's poems have never (at least in this country) been

sufficiently esteemed. Mr. Lowell has written ("The Biglow Papers"



apart) but little in this vein. Mr. Wendell Holmes, your delightful

godfather, Gifted, has written much with perhaps some loss from the



very quantity. A little of vers de societe, my dear Gifted, goes a

long way, as you will think, if ever you sit down steadily to read



right through any collection of poems in this manner. So do not add

too rapidly to your own store; let them be "few, but roses" all of



them.

RICHARDSON



By Mrs. Andrew Lang.

[This letter is excluded from this version of the eText until the



copyright status of Mrs. Andrew Lang's work in the UK can be

ascertained.]



GERARD DE NERVAL

To Miss Girton, Cambridge.



Dear Miss Girton,--Yes, I fancy Gerard de Nerval is one of that

rather select party of French writers whom Mrs. Girton will allow



you to read. But even if you read him, I do not think you will care

very much for him. He is a man's author, not a woman's; and yet one



can hardly say why. It is not that he offends "the delicacy of your

sex," as Tom Jones calls it; I think it is that his sentiment,



whereof he is full, is not of the kind you like. Let it be admitted

that, when his characters make love, they might do it "in a more



human sort of way."

In this respect, and in some others, Gerard de Nerval resembles



Edgar Poe. Not that his heroes are always attached to a belle morte

in some distant Aiden; not that they have been for long in the



family sepulchre; not that their attire is a vastly becoming shroud-

-no, Aurelie and Sylvie, in Les Filles de Feu, are nice and natural



girls; but their lover is not in love with them "in a human sort of

way." He is in love with some vaporous ideal, of which they faintly



remind him. He is, as it were, the eternal passer-by; he is a

wanderer from his birth; he sees the old chateau, or the farmer's



cottage, or even the bright theatre, or the desert tent; he sees the

daughters of men that they are fair and dear, in moonlight, in



sunlight, in the glare of the footlights, and he looks, and longs,

and sighs, and wanders on his fatal path. Nothing can make him



pause, and at last his urgent spirit leads him over the limit of

this earth, and far from the human shores; his delirious fancy



haunts graveyards, or the fabled harbours of happy stars, and he who

rested never, rests in the grave, forgetting his dreams or finding



them true.

All this is too vague for you, I do not doubt, but for me the man



and his work have an attraction I cannot very well explain, like the

personal influence of one who is your friend, though other people



cannot see what you see in him.

Gerard de Nerval (that was only his pen-name) was a young man of the



young romantic school of 1830; one of the set of Hugo and Gautier.

Their gallant, school-boyish absurdities are too familiar to be



dwelt upon. They were much of Scott's mind when he was young, and

translated Burger, and "wished to heaven he had a skull and cross-



bones." Two or three of them died early, two or three subsided into

ordinary literary gentlemen (like M. Maquet, lately deceased), two,



nay three, became poets--Victor Hugo, Theophile Gautier, and Gerard

de Nerval. It is not necessary to have heard of Gerard; even that



queer sham, the lady of culture, admits without a blush that she

knows not Gerard. Yet he is worth knowing.



What he will live by is his story of "Sylvie;" it is one of the

little masterpieces of the world. It has a Greek perfection. One



reads it, and however old one is, youth comes back, and April, and a

thousand pleasant sounds of birds in hedges, of wind in the boughs,



of brooks trotting merrily under the rustic bridges. And this fresh

nature is peopled by girls eternally young, natural, gay, or



pensive, standing with eager feet on the threshold of their life,

innocent, expectant, with the old ballads of old France on their



lips. For the story is full of those artless, lisping numbers of

the popular French Muse, the ancient ballads that Gerard collected



and put in the mouth of Sylvie, the pretty peasant girl.

Do you know what it is to walk alone all day on the Border, and what



good company to you the burn is that runs beside the highway? Just

so companionable is the music of the ballads in that enchanted



country of Gerard's fancy, in the land of the Valois. All the while




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