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 you read, you have a sense of the briefness of the pleasure, you know that the hero cannot rest here, that the girls and their loves, the cottage and its shelter, are not for him.  He is only passing by, happy yet wistful, far untravelled horizons are alluring him, the great city is drawing him to herself and will slay him one day in her den, as Scylla slew her victims.

Conceive Gerard living a wild life with wilder young men and women in a great barrack of an old hotel that the painters amused themselves by decorating.  Conceive him coming home from the play, or rather from watching the particular actress for whom he had a distant, fantastic passion.  He leaves the theatre and takes up a newspaper, where he reads that tomorrow the Archers of Senlis are to meet the Archers of Loisy.  These were places in his native district, where he had been a boy.  They recalled many memories; he could not sleep that night; the old scenes flashed before his half-dreaming eyes.  This was one of the visions.