It is not necessary to exaggerate the importance of the half-dozen volumes which make up the works of Gérard de Nerval. He was not a great writer; he had moments of greatness; and it is the particular quality of these moments which is of interest for us. There is the entertaining, but not more than entertaining, Voyage en Orient; there is the estimable translation of Faust, and the admirable versions from Heine; there are the volumes of short stories and sketches, of which even Les Illuminés, in spite of the promise of its title, is little more than an agreeable compilation. But there remain three compositions: the sonnets, Le Rêve et la Vie, and Sylvie; of which Sylvie is the most objectively achieved, a wandering idyl, full of pastoral delight, and containing some folk-songs of Valois, two of which have been translated by Rossetti; Le Rêve et la Vie being the most intensely personal, a narrative of madness, unique as madness itself; and the sonnets, a kind of miracle, which may be held to have created something at least of the method of the later Symbolist. These three compositions, in which alone Gérard is
