passed for a Voltairean, did indeed claim to have "saved from the
wreck an indestructible belief"; [1837] and Lamartine goes to the
side of Christianity; but de Musset, the most inspired of décadents,
was no more Christian than Heine, save for what a critic has called
"la banale religiosité de l'Espoir en Dieu", [1838] and the pessimist
Baudelaire had not even that to show. De Musset's absurd attack
on Voltaire in his Byronic poem, Rolla, well deserves the same
epithets. It is a mere product of hysteria, representing neither
knowledge nor reflection. The grandiose theism of Victor Hugo,
again, is stamped only with his own image and superscription; and
in his great contemporary Leconte de Lisle we have one of the most
convinced and aggressive freethinkers of the century, a fine scholar
and a self-controlled pessimist, who felt it well worth his while to
write a little Popular History of Christianity (1871) which would have
delighted d'Holbach. It is significant, on the other hand, that the
exquisite religious verse of Verlaine was the product of an incurable
neuropath, like the later work of Huysmans, and stands for decadence
pure and simple. While French belles lettres thus in general made for
rationalism, criticism was naturally not behindhand. Sainte-Beuve,
the most widely appreciative though not the most scientific or just
of critics, had only a literary sympathy with the religious types
over whom he spent so much effusive research; [1839] Edmond Scherer
was an unbeliever almost against his will; Taine, though reactionary
on political grounds in his latter years, was the typical French
rationalist of his time; and though M. Brunetière, whose preferences
were all for Bossuet, made "the bankruptcy of science" the text of
his very facile philosophy, the most scientific and philosophic head
in the whole line of French critics, the late Émile Hennequin, was
wholly a rationalist; and even the rather reactionary Jules Lemaître
did not maintain his early attitude of austerity towards Renan.