But if his work is to have the
highest sort of interest, if it is to do something more than satisfy
curiosity, if it is to have an aesthetic as distinct from an historical
value, it is not enough for a poet to have been the true child of his
age, to have conformed to its aesthetic conditions, and by so conforming
to have charmed and stimulated that age; it is necessary that there
should be perceptible in his work something individual, inventive,
unique, the impress there of the writer's own temper and personality.
This impress M. Sainte-Beuve thought he found in the Antiquites de Rome,
and the Regrets, which he ranks as what has been called poesie intime,
that intensely modern sort of poetry in which the writer has for his aim
the portraiture of his own most intimate moods, and to take the reader
into his confidence. That generation had other instances of this intimacy
of sentiment: Montaigne's Essays are full of it, the carvings of the
church of Brou are full of it. M. Sainte-Beuve has perhaps exaggerated
the influence of this quality in Du Bellay's Regrets; but the very name
of the book has a touch of Rousseau about it, and reminds one of a whole
generation of self-pitying poets in modern times.
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