[Footnote 14: _Doctrine of the Mean_, ch. xxxiii, v. 2.]
Following Rousseau and Chateaubriand come a striking group of Frenchmen who passed on this torch of ethical and aesthetic rebellion. Some of them are wildly romantic like Dumas and Hugo; some of them perversely realistic like Balzac, Flaubert, Gautier, Zola. Paul Verlaine, a near contemporary of ours, is of this first number; writer of some of the most exquisite lyrics in the French language, yet a man who floated all his life in typical romantic fashion from passion to repentance, "passing from lust of the flesh to sorrow for sin in perpetual alternation." Guy de Maupassant again is a naturalist of the second sort, a brutal realist; de Maupassant, who died a suicide, crying out to his valet from his hacked throat "_Encore l'homme au rancart_!"--another carcass to the dustheap!
In English letters Wordsworth in his earlier verse illustrated the same sentimental primitivism. It would be unfair to quote _Peter Bell_, for that is Wordsworth at his dreadful worst, but even in _Tinlern Abbey_, which has passages of incomparable majesty and beauty, there are lines in which he declares himself:
"... well pleased to recognize In nature, and the language of the sense The anchor of my purest thought, the nurse, The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul Of all my moral being."
Byron's innate sophistication saves him from the ludicrous depths to which Wordsworth sometimes fell, but he, too, is Rousseau's disciple, a moral rebel, a highly personal and subjective poet of whom Goethe said that he respected no law, human or divine, except that of the three unities. Byron's verse is fascinating; it overflows with a sort of desperate and fiery sincerity; but, as he himself says, his life was one long strife of "passion with eternal law." He combines both the romantic and the realistic elements of naturalism, both flames with elemental passion and parades his cynicism, is forever snapping his mood in _Don Juan_, alternating extravagant and romantic feeling with lines of sardonic and purposely prosaic realism. Shelley is a naturalist, too, not in the realm of sordid values but of Arcadian fancy. The pre-Raphaelites belong here, together with a group of young Englishmen who flourished between 1890 and 1914, of whom John Davidson and Richard Middleton, both suicides, are striking examples. Poor Middleton turned from naturalism to religion at the last. When he had resolved on death, he wrote a message telling what he was about to do, parting from his friend with brave assumption of serenity. But he did not send the postcard, and in the last hour of that hired bedroom in Brussels, with the bottle of chloroform before him, he traced across the card's surface "a broken and a contrite spirit thou wilt not despise." So there was humility at the last. One remembers rather grimly what the clown says in _Twelfth Night_,