[1]Thiers was the grandson of this lady's sister.
[1]Thiers was the grandson of this lady's sister.
[2]Sainte-Beuve is evidently in error, when, in his comparison of André Chénier with Mathurin Régnier (in his book on French poetry in the sixteenth century), he attributes the poemLa Libertéto a period subsequent to Chénier's residence in London. Becq de Fouquières has proved the improbability of Andre's having been in London before 1790.
[2]Sainte-Beuve is evidently in error, when, in his comparison of André Chénier with Mathurin Régnier (in his book on French poetry in the sixteenth century), he attributes the poemLa Libertéto a period subsequent to Chénier's residence in London. Becq de Fouquières has proved the improbability of Andre's having been in London before 1790.
The first author to show the influence of Chénier was one of the most artistically audacious of the school, one of its original leaders—Alfred de Vigny—who as lyric poet was at times very faulty, at times an immaculate master. Chaste, lucid, pure, and austere, there is a quality in his best verse which has led all the critics who have attempted to describe it to employ such figures as the sheen of ivory, the whiteness of ermine, the sailing of the swan. It has the artistic severity, the sober colouring, the conciseness and the fastidiousness which also characterise Chénier's. And De Vigny was evidently afraid that these qualities would be attributed to Chénier's influence. For although no collection of his poetry was published before 1819, he took the trouble in later editions to furnish a number of the poems which seem to bear the clearest marks of this influence, with earlier dates, going even as far back as 1815. But even leaving out of consideration the fact that single poems of Chénier's had been given to the public (in Chateaubriand'sGénie du Christianismeand as a supplement to Millevoye's poetical works) still earlier than this, it is hardly possible to avoid the conclusion that, in spite of the absolute uprightness which as a rule distinguished him, Alfred de Vigny has antedated his poems to give himself an undeserved appearance of complete originality. For the single poems which he published before the first collection in question are far inferior to those contained in it which bear a much earlier date—so inferior that he excluded them from the complete edition of his works. André Chénier's influence upon De Vigny is thus indisputable. The latter assimilated many of the characteristics of the rediscovered master, though he emancipated himself from the old-fashioned Hellenism of style which hampered Chénier's flight. The poemLa Dryade, to which he gives the additional title of "Idyll in the manner of Theocritus," is in reality an idyll in the manner of André Chénier. What distinguishes De Vigny most markedly from Chénier as a lyric poet is his cult of pure intellect and his proud, stoic feeling of solitude. He has painted his own ideal portrait in such poems asMoïse, La colère de Samson, andLa mort du loup. He is very present in Moses' sad cry:
"O Seigneur, j'ai vécu puissant et solitaire,Laissez-moi m'endormir du sommeil de la terre!"
I seem to hear the plaint of his strong, sorely wounded self-esteem in Samson's outburst of wrath over Delilah's treachery (his Delilah being the great actress, Marie Dorval). Thrice already has he forgiven her, but she has been more ashamed than surprised at finding herself discovered and forgiven:
"Car la bonté de l'Homme est forte et sa douceurÉcrase, en l'absolvant, l'être faible et menteur."
And I feel his stoicism, and at the same time read an apology for his unproductiveness, in those words in the poem on the wolf which dies without uttering a sound:
"À voir ce que l'on fut sur terre et ce que l'on laisse,Seul le silence est grand, tout le reste est faiblesse."
Granted that there is a little affected rigidity in this attitude of his, still it is his pride, his spiritual nobility, his desire to perpetuate in his poetry the purity and austerity of his spirit, which impel him to assume it.
The poet who undertook the further development of Chénier's lyrical style was a man of different intellectual stamp from both him and De Vigny—a man intoxicated with self-confidence. Victor Hugo was three-and-twenty, "the bright dawn illumining his spring." In one of his poems ("À Mademoiselle J.," inChants du Crépuscule) he has himself described the certainty of victory with which he made his début as a lyric poet:
"Alors je disais aux étoiles:O mon astre, en vain tu te voiles.Je sais que tu brilles là-haut!Alors je disais à la rive:Vous êtes la gloire, et j'arrive.Chacun de mes jours est un flot!Je disais au bois: forêt sombre,J'ai comme toi des bruits sans nombre.À l'aigle: contemple mon front!Je disais aux coupes vidées:Je suis plein d'ardentes idéesDont les âmes s'enivreront!Alors, du fond de vingt calices,Rosée, amour, parfum, délices,Se répandaient sur mon sommeil;J'avais des fleurs plein mes corbeilles;Et comme un vif essaim d'abeillesMes pensées volaient au soleil!La terre me disait: Poète!Le ciel me répétait: Prophète!Marche! parle! enseigne! bénis!Penche l'urne des chants sublimes!Verse aux vallons noirs comme aux cimes,Dans les aires et dans les nids!"
Victor Hugo took the verse which André Chénier had created, that pellucid medium of pure beauty, and when he had breathed upon it, it gleamed with all the colours of the rainbow. Strangely enough it was again from Greece that the inspiration came; but this time from modern Greece. Under the impression produced by the Greek War of Liberation Hugo set to work to write hisOrientales. But what a different use of language! The words painted; the words shone, "gilded by a sunbeam" like the beautiful Jewess of the poems; they sang, as if to a secret accompaniment of Turkish music.
First had come Oehlenschläger's East. This was the East of the child, of the fairy-tale book, of theThousand and One Nights—half Persia, half Copenhagen. It was dreams of genii in lamps and rings, of diamonds and sapphires by the bushel, the illimitable splendours of imagination all grouped round a few imperishable poetic types.
Then came Byron's East, a great decorative background for passion in its recklessness and melancholy.
The third in order was Goethe's, the East of theWest-östlicher Divan, the refuge of the old man. He took the reposeful, the contemplative element of Oriental philosophy and wove German Lieder into it. Rückert, the great word-artist, followed in his steps.
But Hugo's East was different from all of these; it was the brightly variegated, outward, barbaric East, the land of light and colour. Sultans and muftis, dervishes and caliphs, hetmans, pirates, Klephts—delicious sounds in his ears, delightful pictures before his eyes. Time is a matter of indifference—far back antiquity, Middle Ages, or to-day; race is a matter of indifference—Hebrew, Moor, or Turk; place is a matter of indifference—Sodom and Gomorrah, Granada, Navarino; creed is a matter of indifference. "No one," he tells us in his preface, "has a right to ask the poet whether he believes in God or in gods, in Pluto, in Satan, or in nothing." His province is to paint. He is possessed by a genius which leaves him no peace until the East, as he feels it, is before him upon paper.
A careful study of theOrientalesshows us how they came into being. They were not written in the order in which they stand in the book. The first poem in order of production is No. 23, "La ville prise," written in 1824; next come poems written in 1826 and 1827 upon incidents in the War of Liberation, and not until 1828 is the poet's imagination thoroughly fired. The horizon widens; all the elements which tend, by reason of a close or distant connection of ideas, to crystallise round the Turkish war, group themselves round that nucleus.
If we examine the little poem, "La ville prise," which is an outcome of the powerful emotion produced in the poet by the martyrdom of Greece, we are struck by the identity of its standpoint with the standpoint of the French Romantic school of painting. In 1824 Eugène Delacroix exhibits his famous picture of the "Massacre of Scio," a bold and masterly delineation, glowing with flaming colour and intense feeling, of a horrible incident, destitute of the slightest element of conventional poetic justice. Very soon after this Hugo writes his little poem. It purports to be the intelligence brought by a humble slave. Standing with his hands crossed on his breast, he says:
"La flamme par ton ordre, ô Roi, luit et dévore.De ton peuple en grondant elle étouffe les cris;Et, rougissant les toits comme une sombre aurore,Semble en son vol joyeux danser sur leurs débris.Le meurtre aux mille bras comme un géant se lève;Les palais embrasés se changent en tombeaux;Pères, femmes, époux, tout tombe sous le glaive;Autour de la cité s'appellent les corbeaux.Les mères ont frémi! les vierges palpitantes,O calife! ont pleuré leurs jeunes ans flétris;Et les coursiers fougueux ont traîné hors des tentesLeurs corps vivans, de coups et de baisers meurtris!Les tout petits enfans, écrasés sous les dalles,Ont vécu: de leur sang le fer s'abreuve encor...—Ton peuple baise, ô Roi, la poudre des sandalesQu'à ton pied glorieux attache un cercle d'or!"
This is the first chord which Hugo strikes in these poems; it rings sharp and shrill; but the poem is not quite good, because it is not quite true. It was not thus the slave spoke; we are sensible of the poet's own indignation in the narrative. The next poems, "Les têtes du Sérail," "Enthousiasme," and "Navarin," bear additional evidence to the modern Greek influence to which we originally oweLes Orientales. But then the poet makes a great artistic advance; he transports himself to the standpoint of the Turks, writes himself into their frame of mind.
"La douleur du Pacha" is the first, half-ironic attempt. Dervishes and bombardiers, odalisques and slaves, one after the other, each from his or her own point of view, try to imagine what can be the reason of the Pacha's sitting musing in his tent with his eyes full of tears. But none of the reasons that occur to them is the true one. It is not that his favourite concubine has been unfaithful, nor yet that there has been a head too few in the fellah's sack. No, he is grieving over the death of his favourite Nubian tiger.
But this is still only an attempt. The poet has not yet entirely got rid of himself, got outside of himself; we are conscious of him in one weak spot, which disturbs and dissolves the mental picture. But now comes the "Marche turque," and we are in the East.
Though the refrain of this masterly poem is a very barbarous one, its general tone is not savage; it is serious, full of a piety which is not the less heartfelt, and of ideas of honour which are not the less sincere because they are different from ours:
"Ma dague d'un sang noir à mon côté ruisselle,Et ma hache est pendue à l'arçon de ma selle.J'aime le vrai soldat, effroi de Bélial;Son turban évasé rend son front plus sévère;Il baise avec respect la barbe de son père,Il voue à son vieux sabre un amour filial,Et porte un doliman percé dans les mêléesDe plus de coups que n'a de taches étoiléesLa peau du tigre impérial.Ma dague d'un sang noir à mon côté ruisselle,Et ma hache est pendue à l'arçon de ma selle.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Celui qui d'une femme aime les entretiens;Celui qui ne sait pas dire dans une orgieQuelle est d'un beau cheval la généalogie;Qui cherche ailleurs qu'en soi force, amis et soutiens,Sur de soyeux divans se couche avec mollesse,Craint le soleil, sait lire, et par scrupule laisseTout le vin de Chypre aux chrétiens;Ma dague d'un sang noir à mon côté ruisselle,Et ma hache est pendue à l'arçon de ma selle.Celui-là, c'est un lâche, et non pas un guerrier.Ce n'est pas lui qu'on voit dans la bataille ardentePousser un fier cheval, à la housse pendante,La sabre en main, debout sur le large étrier;Il n'est bon qu'à presser des talons une mule,En murmurant tout bas quelque vaine formule,Comme un prêtre qui va prier!Ma dague d'un sang noir à mon côté ruisselle,Et ma hache est pendue à l'arçon de ma selle."
There is nothing Greek in this, nor yet any European satire of Turkish barbarity; the poet has become the dramatist within the Turkish intellectual and emotional pale; in this local colouring there is the genuine brutality which no northern poet has ever attained in handling such themes. This is true masculine savagery.
These are not sentimental, but robust major chords; and the major key predominates in all the poems, even where woman and love entwine their rhythms among the harsh, masculine ones. There are cruel, heartless women, like the Jewish sultana who demands the heads of her rivals; and there are refined, musical daughters of Eve, like the captive who longs for her own country and yet loves the sight of Smyrna's fairy palaces, and rejoices in breathing the soft air of the East in winter and in summer, by day and at night when the full moon shines upon the sea. There is the charming woman depicted in "Les adieux de l'hôtesse Arabe." The love which finds expression in this last-named poem is sad in its feeling of unrequitedness, repressed and chaste; it is a mixture of sisterly care, childlike superstition, and submissive worship, which reveals itself with plastic grace in a noble, proud character.
From the moment when the poet deserts the Greek camp for that of the enemy, his imagination allows itself free play. From pictures of Turkish cruelty it passes to the delineation of Turkish superstition. "Les Djinns" is a metrical marvel in which the approach of the wild hunt to the house, its thundering over the heads of the terror-stricken inmates, and its gradual dying away into the distance, are represented by the gradual rise from two-syllabic to ten-syllabic lines and gradual fall back to the two-syllabic. From the life of the Turkish seraglio it wings its flight to the tents of the Bedouins in the desert; from the desert as it is to-day to the desert as it was in the days when Buonaberdi overshadowed it with the wings of his eagles.
Enormous stretches of sand and water, the ordering and manœuvres of masses of troops, the architecture of towns, the sieges and storming of these towns, are seen with the poet's eye; and at a certain moment a natural association of ideas summons up the picture of great scenes of destruction read of in Bible history. In these last Hugo found his most gorgeous material. And it was also the material nearest akin to his own personality. His imagination was always at its best in dealing with the monstrous. The original Pegasus was, in the literal sense of the word, a superb monster, and that is just what Hugo's Pegasus is, in the figurative.
He writes "Le Feu du Ciel," the first poem in the book, the last in chronological order. We see the awful black cloud sailing across the sky. Whence has it come? Whither is it bound? No one knows. Hovering above the sea, it asks the Lord if it shall dry up the waters with its fires. No! answers the Lord, and onward it hurries, driven by His breath. Over the beautiful bays of the Mediterranean, over the fair corn lands of Egypt it passes, but the Lord still gives no signal to stop. Over the desert it flies, over the ruins of ancient Babel. It asks: Is it here? But still onward it must go. In the night time it reaches the magnificent sister cities—Sodom and Gomorrah—whose inhabitants have fallen asleep after their wild, voluptuous revels. Now the Lord gives the signal. The cloud opens, and from its flaming gorge pours a torrent of fire and sulphur and brimstone upon the doomed cities, until agate and porphyry and idols and marble colossi melt like wax, and the dazzling flames envelop and destroy everything living in the houses and the streets. Towards morning the ruin of old Babel is seen to lift its head above the mountain-ridge to see and enjoy the end of the play. It knows all about it; it also in its day has had experience of the love that chasteneth.
This is, as already remarked, not poetry in a minor key; some critics actually accused it of coldness; but if ever there was an unwarrantable accusation this was one. We feel as if the poet had actually seen it all, and had painted it with a brush like that pine which Heine would fain have torn from the Norwegian cliffs and dipped in the fire of Etna, to write with it the name of his beloved across the expanse of heaven. TheseOrientalesbecame the model for Romantic lyric poetry. In them the poet dared to lay hold of the painful, the ugly, the terrible (τό δεινόν as the Greeks said), and incorporate it in his verse, assured of his power to penetrate it all with poetry, to impart transparency to all these shadows and immerge all the blackness in a poetic sea of light. What he once wrote of the earth may be applied to his own lyric poetry. He describes the poor, stony, niggardly soil, which unwillingly yields man his daily bread; burning deserts here, polar ice there; cities from which mercy and hope have departed wringing their hands. He paints death, an eyeless spectre which generally seizes the best first; tells of seas where ships are wrecked in the night, and of continents where howling war swings its torches and races fall furiously one upon the other. And, he concludes, of all this is composed a star in the firmament of heaven.
Scarcely had Victor Hugo completedLes Orientalesbefore he set to work upon a series of poems of a completely different character.Feuilles d'Automneconquered a new territory for French lyric poetry, a domain in which the personal element was as conspicuously present as it had been absent inLes Orientales.
Hugo had married at the age of twenty on the strength of a trifling pension granted him by Louis XVIII. The dowry of his beloved bride, Adèle Foucher, was 2000 francs. The young couple lived for a number of years in straitened circumstances; but after theHernanibattle was won, Hugo's writings began to bring him in thousands, which rose to hundreds of thousands, and finally to millions. Still, the poor home was a happy one, and when, at the age of twenty-five, Hugo appeared before the public as a literary revolutionist, he was the father of a family.
InFeuilles d'Automnethe poet presents his readers with pictures and thoughts of his own home. They are memories of his childhood and his beloved dead, remembrances of his mother's tenderness, of his father's soldierly figure and mien, of Napoleon, whom, standing by his father's side as a child, he had once seen. He unburdens his heart to intimate friends, confesses to them the sadness and the doubts induced in him by the hard battle of life. There are love poems too, matchless ones. He finds his first love-letters and reads them with a heart full of sadness and of longing for the vanished first freshness of youth. He gives us the poetry of his home. This was a side of life which almost all the great poets of the world had left untouched. Shakespeare had no home, and his conjugal relations were not such as to deserve writing about. Schiller and Goethe wrote few poems to their wives, and none about their family life. What Byron had thought fit to communicate to the world of such matters was the reverse of edifying. Oehlenschläger, whose personal circumstances and literary position in many respects resemble Hugo's, did not marry his Christiane till her youth was past. When he writes of his wife his tone is more dutiful than chivalrous; she is rather his Morgiana than his Gulnare; and in his poems about his children there is a touch of parental vanity; he writes of them in the style in which royal personages sometimes allude to theirs on public occasions; we feel that he regards them as beings whose welfare must be of importance to every one. Hugo avoided these pitfalls.
Not that Adèle Foucher remained the central female figure in Hugo's life during all the years when he was singing of his home.Feuilles d'Automneis the last collection of his poems in which he could truthfully write of the happiness he found there. In 1833, during the rehearsals of hisLucrèce Borgia, he became intimate with the young and beautiful, though talentless, actress, Juliette Drouet (her real name was Julienne Gauvain), whom he had chosen to play the very small part of the Princess Negroni. This lady's contemporaries write with enthusiasm of her beauty, which is said to have combined the purity of outline of the Greek statue with the poetic expression which we attribute to Shakespeare's heroines. In Hugo's tragedy she had only two words to say, merely walked across the stage; yet Théophile Gautier, after describing her lovely dress, writes thus of her performance: "She resembled a lizard that had erected itself on its tail, so wavy, supple, and serpentlike was her carriage. And with all her charm, how skilfully she managed to insinuate something poisonous into her words! With what mocking and perturbing agility did she avoid the attentions of the handsome Venetian noblemen!"
Juliette Drouet's profile was antique, and she had a profusion of beautiful hair. Pradier, the sculptor, has immortalised her in the statue of the city of Lille in the Place de la Concorde in Paris.
When Hugo made her acquaintance he was thirty-one and she twenty-seven; and their connection lasted until her death, that is, for nearly fifty years. After 1833 she accompanied him on his travels, and both during and after his exile "Madame Juliette Drouet" lived in his house.
His wife, between whom and Sainte-Beuve there was soon a liaison which the latter's literary indiscretions made unnecessarily public, seems as long as she lived to have borne patiently with Hugo's inconstancy; and Hugo's letters show that he, in his turn, showed both dignity and great delicacy of feeling in the way in which he received Sainte-Beuve's intimation of his passion for Madame Hugo.
In his poetry, at least, Hugo remained united by the tenderest of ties to his home.
It is in theChants du Crépusculewhich were published in 1835, consequently long after he and Juliette Drouet had become closely connected, that (in the poem "Date lilia!") he writes of his wife as the being to whom he says:Toujours!and who answers:Partout!
And it is in this same poem that we have the perfectly charming picture of the young mother followed by her four children, the youngest of whom still walks with tottering steps:
"Oh! si vous rencontrez quelque part sous les cieuxUne femme au front pur, au pas grave, aux doux yeux,Que suivent quatre enfants dont le dernier chancelle,Les surveillant bien tous, et, s'il passe auprès d'elleQuelque aveugle indigent que l'âge appesantit,Mettant une humble aumône aux mains du plus petit;Si, quand la diatribe autour d'un nom s'élance,Vous voyez une femme écouter en silence,Et douter, puis vous dire: Attendons pour juger.Quel est celui de nous qu'on ne pourrait charger?On est prompt à ternir les choses les plus belles.La louange est sans pieds et le blâme a des ailes.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Si, loin des feux, des voix, des bruits et des splendeurs,Dans un repli perdu parmi les profondeurs,Sur quatre jeunes fronts groupés près du mur sombre,Vous voyez se pencher un regard voilé d'ombreOù se mêle, plus doux encor que solennel,Le rayon virginal au rayon maternel;Oh! qui que vous soyez, bénissez-la. C'est elle!La sœur, visible aux yeux, de mon âme immortelle!Mon orgueuil, mon espoir, mon abri, mon recours!Toit de mes jeunes ans qu'espèrent mes vieux jours!"
And through all these poems there is a twitter and a hum, a sound as of the play of little children and their bird-like cries. The child rushes into the room, and the darkest brow, nay, even the guilty countenance, brightens; it interrupts the most serious converse with its questions, and the talk ends in a smile; it opens its young soul to every impression, and offers a kiss to strangers and to friends.
"Let the children stay! do not drive them from the poet's study; let them laugh and sing and mingle their childish clamour with the chorus of spirit voices whilst he writes and dreams at his desk. Their breath will not disperse the gay bubbles of his dream. Do you think that I fear, when these bright heads pass before my eyes in the midst of my visions of blood and fire, that my verses will take flight like a flock of birds startled by playing children? No, indeed! No image is destroyed by them. The painted, chased flowers of the gayOrientaleexpand more freely when they are near, the ballad grows more spirited, the winged lines of the ode mount with more ardent aspiration towards heaven."
A sad event which happened in 1843 carried the poet in riper years back to these youthful days and that happy family circle. In February 1843 his eldest daughter married; in September she was accidentally drowned, from a sailing-boat on the Seine. Her husband, Charles Vacquerie, jumped into the water after her, and when his and all attempts to save her proved fruitless, he drowned himself. The series of poems inLes Contemplationsbeginning with the verses, "Oh! je fus comme fou dans le premier moment!" ought to be read along withFeuilles d'Automne.
In this series we come upon simple scenes exquisitely reproduced and full of sincere feeling:
"Elle avait pris ce pli dans son âge enfantinDe venir dans ma chambre un peu chaque matin;Je l'attendais ainsi qu'un rayon qu'on espère;Elle entrait et disait: 'Bonjour, mon petit père;'Prenait ma plume, ouvrait mes livres, s'asseyaitSur mon lit, dérangeait mes papiers et riait,Puis soudain s'en allait comme un oiseau qui passe.Alors je reprenais, la tête un peu moins lasse,Mon œuvre interrompue, et, tout en écrivant,Parmi mes manuscrits je rencontrais souventQuelque arabesque folle et qu'elle avait tracée,Et mainte page blanche entre ses mains froisséeOù, je ne sais comment, venaient mes plus doux vers.Elle aimait Dieu, les fleurs, les astres, les prés verts,Et c'était un esprit avant d'être une femme.Son regard reflétait la clarté de son âme.Elle me consultait sur tout à tous moments.Oh! que de soirs d'hiver radieux et charmantsPassés à raisonner langue, histoire et grammaire,Mes quatre enfants groupés sur mes genoux, leur mèreTout près, quelques amis causant au coin du feu!J'appelais cette vie être content de peu!"
Almost more beautiful is the following poem:—
"O souvenirs! printemps! aurore!Doux rayon triste et réchauffant!—Lorsqu'elle était petite encore,Que sa sœur était tout enfant....—Connaissez-vous sur la collineQui joint Montlignon à Saint-LeuUne terrasse qui s'inclineEntre un bois sombre et le ciel bleu?C'est là que nous vivions.—Pénètre,Mon cœur, dans ce passé charmant!—Je l'entendais sous ma fenêtreJouer le matin doucement.Elle courait dans la rosée,Sans bruit, de peur de m'éveiller;Moi, je n'ouvrais pas ma croisée,De peur de la faire envoler.Ses frères riaient ... Aube pure!Tout chantait sous ces frais berceaux,Ma famille avec la nature,Mes enfants avec les oiseaux!—Je toussais, on devenait brave;Elle montait à petits pas,Et me disait d'un air très-grave:'J'ai laissé les enfants en bas.'Nous jouions toute la journée.O jeux charmants! chers entretiens!Le soir, comme elle était l'aînée,Elle me disait: Père, viens!'Nous allons t'apporter ta chaise,Conte nous une histoire, dis!'—Et je voyais rayonner d'aiseTous ces regards de paradis.Alors, prodiguant les carnages,J'inventais un conte profondDont je trouvais les personnagesParmi les ombres du plafond.Toujours, ces quatre douces têtesRiaient, comme à cet âge on rit,De voir d'affreux géants très bêtesVaincus par des nains pleins d'esprit.J'étais l'Arioste et l'HomèreD'un poëme éclos d'un seul jet;Pendant que je parlais, leur mèreLes regardait rire, et songeait.Leur aïeul, qui lisait dans l'ombre,Sur eux parfois levait les yeux,Et moi, par la fenêtre sombreJ'entrevoyais un coin des cieux!"
In the child's evening prayer, the famous "Prière pour tous," not only for father and mother, but for the poor, the forsaken, the bad—the idea of the family broadens into the idea of the whole great human family. Humanity finds its expression inFeuilles d'Automne, as did inhumanity inLes Orientales.
When the poet sits dreaming alone, he thinks first of those he loves; he sees his friends one after the other; then his acquaintances, intimate and slight; then all the multitude of those unknown to him—the whole of humanity, living and dead; he gazes, until his vision fails, upon the double ocean of time and space, the endless and the bottomless, the endless that is eternally falling into the bottomless. That sense of the infinite which Hugo's great forerunner, André Chénier, despised, that religious feeling which was non-existent in the child of the eighteenth century, reappears in Hugo, purified from the superstition of the reactionary period.
From a height near the shore the poet hears two voices, one from the sea and one from the land. Every wave has its murmur, every human being his distinct utterance, his sigh, his shriek; and the wave voices and the human voices form two great, pathetic choruses—the song of nature and the cry of humanity.
The infinity of these poems is no longer the monstrous thing of which we now and then catch a glimpse inLes Orientales; it is the ocean in which it is natural and, to employ Leopardi's expression, sweet for thought to suffer shipwreck.
InChants du CrépusculeHugo quits the domain of private life. The poems composing this volume are chiefly political. They constitute a kind of diary of the events of the few years preceding their publication. Hugo was a supporter of the constitutional monarchy; he was even made a peer of France by Louis Philippe, and he accepted the King's assistance when in 1845 it was proposed to eject him from the Chamber of Peers because of a notorious love-affair (with Madame Biard). He may be best described at this period as a royalist with a tendency to opposition.
His poems celebrate the days of July and their martyrs, and express indignation at the refusal of the Chamber of Deputies to allow the body of Napoleon to be brought back to France, a project to which the royal family offered no objection, and which was afterwards carried into execution by the Prince de Joinville. The poem directed against Deutz, who gave up the Duchess of Berry to Louis Philippe's government for money ("A l'homme qui a livré une femme "), strikes indirectly not only at Thiers, but at the King himself.
This is, however, an opposition based not upon political, but upon social sympathies. The disappointment of the proletariat at the insignificance of the result of the Revolution of July as far as they were concerned, and the sullen hatred of the well-to-do which was fermenting in the masses, find expression in such poems as "Sur le bal de l'hôtel de ville," with its masterly picture of the women of the people, who, gaudily decked out, beautiful and half-naked, like the ladies who are driving to the ball, stand "with flowers in their hair, dirt on their shoes, and hatred in their hearts," watching the carriages arrive. Vague anxiety and restlessness, warnings to the crowned heads of Europe to make for themselves friends betimes amongst their people, show that the poet has his hand on the pulse of his age.
Nothing could be a better proof of the close relation between Victor Hugo's writings and the spirit of the day than the circumstance that Louis Philippe's government prohibited the performance of his dramas quite as strictly as the Legitimist government had done.Hernanihad, indeed, been played in the preceding reign, Charles X. cleverly replying to those who would have had him prohibit it, that, as far as the theatre was concerned, his place was amongst the audience. But, in spite of his personal partiality for Hugo, he had forbidden the performance ofMarion Delormebecause it was suggested to him that its representation of Louis XIII.'s attitude towards Richelieu, would be interpreted as satire of his own submissiveness to the clergy. This prohibition had long since been repealed, but now the government of Louis Philippe quite illegally forbade the representation ofLe Roi s'amuse. During the lawsuit which ensued, Hugo made the following caustic remarks:
"Napoleon also was a despot, but his behaviour was very different. He employed none of the precautionary measures by means of which our liberties are now being juggled away, one after the other. He put out his hand and took everything at once. The lion does not behave like the fox. Things were done in the grand style then, gentlemen. Napoleon said: 'On such and such a day I will make my entry into such and such a capital,' and he made his entry on the day and at the very hour he had named. A proclamation in theMoniteurdethroned a dynasty. Kings had to sit crowded together waiting in the anterooms. If a column was desired, the Emperor of Austria was obliged to provide the bronze for it. The affairs of the Théâtre Français were certainly regulated in a somewhat arbitrary manner, but the regulations were dated from Moscow. That was the day of great things, this is the day of small."
These words convey a good general idea of Hugo's poetico-political attitude at the beginning of the Thirties.
Round about him his younger friends were working their way to fame. Almost all the frequenters of his house in time revealed themselves to be poets. Hugo would occasionally request Sainte-Beuve to recite, and after much pressing the latter, begging little Léopoldine and little Chariot to make plenty of noise the while, would repeat to the assembled company one or two of his charming, mannered poems. Alfred de Musset, a youth of seventeen, was brought to the house by Paul Foucher, Hugo's brother-in-law. One morning De Musset went up to Sainte-Beuve's garret, wakened him, and said with a shamefaced smile: "I too write verses."
The verses he wrote have attained world-wide fame.
If, amongst French laymen, one were to ask a man of the people—say an artisan, and amongst authors, either a Romanticist or a Parnassian: Who is the greatest modern French poet? the answer would undoubtedly be: Victor Hugo. But if the question were put to a member of the upper middle class—a public official, a savant, a man of the world, or amongst authors, to a member of the naturalistic school, or if one were to appeal to the ladies, in all probability the answer would be: Alfred de Musset. Whence this difference of opinion and what does it denote?
Alfred de Musset made his literary début in 1830, at the age of nineteen, withContes d'Espagne et d'Italie, a series of tales in verse abounding in situations which it would be scarcely permissible to describe. In the longer ones (Don Paez, Portia, &c.) treachery runs riot; we have the wife who deceives her husband, the mistress who deceives her lover, the countess who knows nothing about hers except that he has killed her old husband; we have brutal pleasure, to obtain which men hack and hew at each other, youthful sensuality which knows neither ruth nor shame, senile depravity which employs love potions and listens to the death-rattle with voluptuous pleasure; and, scattered about amongst all this, songs, fiery sparks of passion, savagery, and arrogance. Shakespeare's earliest works are not more wanton than these, and these are, moreover, not naïvely, but refinedly wanton. There is also a constant parade of unbelief, with odd interruptions in the shape of unconscious confessions of weakness and spasmodic longings for the comforts of religion.
Some were scandalised by the book, more praised it enthusiastically. The young men of the literary circles were much struck by it. This was Romanticism of an entirely new kind, much less doctrinaire than Victor Hugo's. Here was a still more direct defiance of the classic rules of metre and style; but this defiance was frolicsome and witty, not martial like Hugo's. These attacks were enlivened by the presence of an element entirely wanting in Hugo's books, and that an essentially national element, what the French themselves callesprit. This jesting, jeering Romanticism was refreshing after Hugo's pompous, serious Romanticism. Here too the scenes were laid in Spain and Italy; here too were medieval backgrounds, sword-thrusts, and serenades; but it all gave twice as much pleasure with this addition of jollity, of subtle satire, of doubt which scarcely believed what it said itself. Take, for example, the notorious, offensively indecent ballad of the moon, which aggravated the Classicists by its metre and the Romanticists by its disrespectful attitude to its subject, their chief favourite. It was a ballad which parodied its own style; its writer seemed to be walking on his hands, kissing his toes to his readers.
Hugo's heroic bearing and giant's stride had compelled reverence; his imposing rhetoric roused respectful admiration; but this miraculous jaunty grace, this genius for shameless drollery, had both an emancipatory and a fascinating effect. There was a diabolical irresistibility about it, a quality which women as a rule are, and in this case were, the first to appreciate. De Musset wrote of women, always of women, and not, like Hugo, with precocious maturity, with chivalrous tenderness, with romantic gallantry—no, with a passion, a hatred, a bitterness, a fury, which showed that he despised and adored them, that they could make him writhe and scream in agony, and that he took his revenge in clamorous accusation and fiery scorn.
There is here no ripeness, wholesomeness, or moral beauty, but a youthful, seething, incredible intensity of life, any description of which would be no more successful than the description of scarlet given to the blind man, which drew forth the remark: "Then it is like the sound of a trumpet." And in this poetry there is, verily, a quality which suggests scarlet and the flourish of trumpets. That beauty in art is immortal is true; but there is something still more certainly immortal, namely, life. These first poems of De Musset lived. They were followed by his mature, beautiful works; and all men's eyes were opened to his merits. In the poem "Après une lecture" he has himself described his art:
"Celui qui ne sait pas, quand la brise étoufféeSoupire au fond des bois son tendre et long chagrin,Sortir seul au hazard, chantant quelque refrain,Plus fou qu'Ophélia de romarin coiffée,Plus étourdi qu'un page amoureux d'une féeSur son chapeau cassé jouant du tambourin;. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Celui qui n'a pas l'âme à tout jamais aimante,Qui n'a pas pour tout bien, pour unique bonheur,De venir lentement poser son front rêveurSur un front jeune et frais, à la tresse odorante,Et de sentir ainsi d'une tête charmanteLa vie et la beauté descendre dans son cœur;Celui qui ne sait pas, durant les nuits brûlantesQui font pâlir d'amour l'étoile de Vénus,Se lever en sursaut, sans raison, les pieds nus,Marcher, prier, pleurer des larmes ruisselantes,Et devant l'infini joindre des mains tremblantes,Le cœur plein de pitié pour les maux inconnus;Que celui-là rature et barbouille à son aise;Il peut, tant qu'il voudra, rimer à tour de bras,Ravauder l'oripeau qu'on appelle antithèse,Et s'en aller ainsi jusqu'au Père-Lachaise,Traînant à ses talons tous les sots d'ici-bas;Grand homme, si l'on veut; mais poëte, non pas."
In the allusion to those who trick themselves out with the tinsel of antithesis we have a hit at Victor Hugo and his school, and the almost unconscious expression of the genuine lyric poet's feeling of superiority to the gifted rhetorician. The overpowering enthusiasm for poetry and the poetic self-consciousness remind us of Goethe's "Wanderers Sturmlied."
And as De Musset developed and approached the years of discretion, he continued to reveal qualities which outshone Victor Hugo's. He won the hearts of the reading public by his essential humanness. He confessed his weakness and faults; Victor Hugo felt it incumbent on him to be unerring. He was not the marvellous artificer of verse, could not, like Hugo, hammer the metal of language into fashion and put word gems into a setting of gold. He wrote carelessly, rhymed anyhow, even in more slipshod fashion than Heine; but he was never the rhetorician, always the human being. In his joy and his grief there seemed to be an immortal truth. One of his poems flung upon a pile of poems by other poets acted like aquafortis; everything else composing the pile burned up or evaporated, as being mere paper and words; it alone remained, and burned and rang in its piercing truth like a cry from a human breast.
How was it, then, that not he but Hugo became the leader of the young Romantic School?
This question may be answered by reversing the position of the words in the last line of the poem just quoted, and saying: "Poëte si l'on veut; mais grand homme non pas."
In spite of the extraordinary variety of the standpoints adopted by Hugo during the course of his long life, a certain unbroken line of progression is plainly evident in his political and religious development, and, what is almost of more importance, he acts with unfailing dignity. Victor Hugo was a hard worker, Alfred de Musset was exceedingly indolent; Hugo was an excellent economist, who made the most of his great gifts, and did not squander his talents, but carefully preserved both his physical and mental powers; De Musset was reckless in the extreme, neglectful of his health, addicted to narcotics even in his youth. Hugo had the faculty of making his personality a centre, of collecting other men round him and binding them to him, the faculty of the chief and leader; De Musset, the man of the world, was an excellent companion, but De Musset, the artist, was quite incapable of pulling in the traces with others. Hugo had the unbounded belief in himself which made others believe in him.
De Musset begins with an affectation of superiority, with a display of the extremist scepticism in religion and the extremest indifference in politics. But beneath this scepticism and this indifference we soon catch glimpses of an unmanly weakness, which in course of time reveals itself plainly.
Read his masked self-revelation inConfession d'un Enfant du Siècle. He tells how he was born at an unlucky moment. Everything was dead. Napoleon's day was past, and, as if there could be no glory except the glory of the Empire, we are told that the days of glory were at an end. Faith was dead. There was no longer even such a thing as two little pieces of black wood in the form of a cross before which one could devoutly fold one's hands; and therefore, as if there could be neither heart nor soul in those who are not attached to Catholic symbolism, we are told that soul was dead. Some who comprehended that the day of glory was past, proclaimed from the rostrum that liberty was a finer thing even than glory, and at these words the hearts of the youthful audience began to beat, as with a distant, terrible remembrance. "But on their way home these youths met a procession carrying three baskets to Clamart, and in the baskets they saw the corpses of three young men who had been too loud in their praises of liberty;" and, as if callous despair were the only mental attitude which the death of martyrs can produce, we are told that their lips curled with a strange smile, and that they forthwith plunged headlong into the maddest dissipation.
Such is the basis, the underlying idea, of a whole series of the cleverest masculine characters drawn by De Musset, that remarkable creation Lorenzaccio among the number. In his youth it produced Rolla, the most famous of his typical characters.
In none of De Musset's works does the unstable, vacillating, feminine quality in his philosophy display itself more markedly than inRolla.
The introduction opens with the well-known wail of longing for the Greece of old with its freshness and beauty, and for the Christendom of old, with its pure aspiration and fervent faith, for the days when the cathedrals of Cologne and Strasburg, of Notre-Dame and St. Peter, knelt devoutly in their mantles of stone and the great organ of the nations pealed forth the hosanna of the centuries.
Upon this follows the still more famous passage:
"O Christ! je ne suis pas de ceux que la prièreDans tes temples muets amène à pas tremblants;Je ne suis pas de ceux qui vont à ton Calvaire,En se frappant le cœur, baiser tes pieds sanglants;Et je reste debout sous tes sacrés portiques,Quand ton peuple fidèle, autour des noirs arceaux,Se courbe en murmurant sous le vent des cantiques,Comme au souffle du nord un peuple de roseaux.Je ne crois pas, ô Christ! à ta parole sainte:Je suis venu trop tard dans un monde trop vieux.D'un siècle sans espoir naît un siècle sans crainte.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Les clous du Golgotha te soutiennent à peine;Sous ton divin tombeau le sol s'est dérobé:Ta gloire est morte, ô Christ! et sur nos croix d'ébèneTon cadavre céleste en poussière est tombée!Eh bien! qu'il soit permis d'en baiser la poussièreAu moins crédule enfant de ce siècle sans foi,Et de pleurer, ô Christ! sur cette froide terreQui vivait de ta mort, et qui mourra sans toi!'
Then comes the story.—Jacques Rolla is the most dissipated youth in the dissipated city of Paris. He sneers at everything and every one. "No son of Adam ever had a more supreme contempt for people and for king." His means are small, but his love of luxury and voluptuousness is great. Custom, which constitutes half the life of other men, is utterly obnoxious to him. Therefore he divides the small fortune left him by his father into three parts, three purses of money, each to last a year. He spends them in the company of bad women upon all manner of foolishness, making no secret of his intention to shoot himself at the end of the third year.
And De Musset, aged 22, calls Rolla great, intrepid, honourable, and proud. His love of liberty—and by liberty is understood freedom from every kind of activity, from every calling, every duty—ennobles him in the poet's eyes.
We have the description of the night of Rolla's suicide in the house of ill-fame, of the preparations for the orgy, of the girl of sixteen who is brought by her own mother; and then the poet begins his affecting lament over the terrible depravity of society—the mother who sells her child, the poverty which drives her to the trade of procuress, the cheap chastity and hypocritical virtue of fortunately situated women.
And now comes the most famous passage of the poem, the apostrophe to Voltaire:
"Dors-tu content, Voltaire, et ton hideux sourireVoltige-t-il encore sur tes os décharnés?Ton siècle était, dit-on, trop jeune pour te lire;Le nôtre doit te plaire, et tes hommes sont nés.Il est tombé sur nous, cet édifice immenseQue de tes larges mains tu sapais nuit et jour.La Mort devait t'attendre avec impatience.Pendant quatre-vingts ans que tu lui fis ta cour.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Vois-tu, vieil Arouet? cet homme plein de vieQui de baisers ardents couvre ce sein si beau,Sera couché demain dans un étroit tombeau.Jetterais-tu sur lui quelques regards d'envie?Sois tranquille, il fa lu. Rien ne peut lui donnerNi consolation, ni lueur d'espérance."
What had Voltaire to do with the death of this contemptible spendthrift. Is the great worker to be held responsible for the suicide of the idle voluptuary? Is this world of fantastic fools and women without wills, the world of which Voltaire dreamed? Voltaire, who was reason incarnate, whose hands, if they were black, were blackened only with gunpowder, whose life was a determined struggle for light? Is all this misery his fault? And if so, why?
Because he had no dogmatic faith.
The want of dogmatic faith is Rolla's excuse for living like an animal and dying like a boy. See what has become in the course of a few years of the bold defiance with which the poet began his career. The defiance has turned into faint-hearted doubt, the atheism into hopeless despair.
How healthy, how determined and calm is Hugo's attitude compared with this! Is it not easy now to understand how, in spite of everything, he continued to hold the central place in French literature?
Ere the Thirties were half over, the literary revolution inaugurated by Hugo and his friends was victorious. This assertion may be made with truth, though the victory was as yet only a spiritual one. A very small minority of the most cultivated men and most intelligent women of France recognised that the battle was decided, that classic tragedy was dead, that the Aristotelian rules were mistakes, that the men of the transition period had had their day, that Casimir Delavigne's vein was exhausted, and that the only literary aspirants who knew their own minds were the generation of 1830. The fact that a movement of exactly the same kind had begun in painting, sculpture, and music showed more plainly than anything else how deep-seated and irresistible the change was.
But those who apprehended this were, as already observed, a small minority. The stiff, formal literature of the days of the Empire had on its side custom, the fear of novelty, stupidity, envy; it was supported by the whole official class, the press (with the solitary exception of one daily newspaper, theJournal des Débats), and the government; all government appointments and pensions were bestowed exclusively on men of the old school, a fact which acted as a powerful temptation to the rising generation. And there was, moreover, a certain amount of weariness and discouragement in the new camp after the first great intellectual effort. The combatants were young; they had fancied that one mighty onslaught would be sufficient to capture the defences of prejudice; and it was with a feeling of disappointment that they found themselves after the attack still only at the foot of the redoubt, with their numbers greatly reduced. They lost patience and ardour for the fight. They had been quite prepared for an obstinate struggle, entailing losses, wounds, and scars, but upon the condition of its leading to a comparatively speedy victory, to a conspicuous triumph, with applause and flourish of trumpets. But this seemingly endless strife, the constant ridicule poured on them, the enemy's undisturbed occupation of all influential positions in the domains of literature and art, the continued indifference of the public to the new, and its enthusiasm for the superannuated school—all this aroused misgivings in the minds of the youthful forces. Some among them asked themselves if they had not gone too far in their youthful ardour, if His Majesty the public were not perhaps right, or at least partly right, after all; and they began to make excuses for their talent, and to try to win the forgiveness of the public for it by concessions and apostasy. Some deserted their friends, in order to gain admission to this, that, or the other distinguished circle of society. Others, with the Academy in view, began to regulate their behaviour so as not to spoil their chance of becoming members of it while still comparatively young men.
A nobler feeling too, the individual author's feeling of independence, contributed to break up the group. The ties by which it was at first attempted to hold it together were of too cramping a nature. The leaders had not been contented with indicating a general direction, announcing a guiding artistic principle; they had evolved a regular code of doctrines. And these inventors of artistic dogmas were not far-sighted, unbiassed thinkers, but poets, as one-sided as they were gifted. Sociable as men of the Latin race undoubtedly are in comparison with others, a literary association of this kind was nevertheless an impossibility in France. Men of science may agree upon a common line of action, but one of the requirements of art is the complete, absolute independence of the individual; only when the creative artist is completely himself, not when he gives up any part whatsoever of his valuable individuality for the sake of combination, does he produce the best which he is capable of giving to the world. Absolute individualism is, of course, impossible in art; consciously or unconsciously, voluntarily or involuntarily, groups are formed; and, certain as it is that the individual must be permitted to express himself freely, it is just as certain that only in artistic continuity, only with the support and inspiration of artistic tradition, or of kindred spirits—great predecessors or contemporaries, can he attain to the highest. Isolated, overstrained geniuses droop and decay. But where a school has a single acknowledged leader, that leader must have the capacity of imparting freedom. He must make allowance for everything except want of character and style. A man of Hugo's stamp could not impart freedom, and the more fanatical among his adherents interpreted the doctrines of the school in a much narrower fashion than he did. In the course of a few years the characteristics of the most distinguished young members of the school developed in a more marked manner than could have been foreseen while they were still in the germ, and the revolt of these notable personages was of advantage to the old Classic party.
Yet another circumstance aided the process of disintegration. The Revolution of July transferred a number of the youthful standard-bearers and champions of the literary camp to the political. It is significant that in 1830 theGlobeceased to be a literary organ and passed into the hands of the Saint-Simonists. Its founders and most important contributors, men like Guizot, Thiers, Villemain, and Vitet, became members of Parliament, public officials, or ministers of state. And since in our days the pursuit of politics leads much more quickly to fame than that of literature, even poets were tempted to mount the political platforms. Men like Hugo and Lamartine engaged actively in politics during the reign of Louis Philippe. The authors who continued to confine their attention to literature felt themselves distanced by those who combined politics with it, and could not help being at times irritated by the more noisy fame attained by these latter, and by seeing literature, their own all in all, regarded as an alternative good enough to have recourse to in time of need.
It was a severe blow to the Romantic School when Sainte-Beuve, its valiant, enthusiastic herald, withdrew from his post as one of Hugo's staff. He seems, with that curious mixture of humility and independence which distinguished his character, to have been long annoyed with himself for the attitude of submission to Hugo which he had assumed in his poetry, and to have nevertheless gone on unwillingly swinging his censer before the head of the school. The habit Hugo had got into of expecting or demanding huge doses of incense was obnoxious to him, and yet he was too weak to withhold his tribute. It was, however, undoubtedly less admiration for Hugo than for Hugo's young wife which kept Sainte-Beuve within the magic circle. The private rupture between him and Hugo in 1836 was the signal for a complete change in his literary attitude towards the poet of theOrientales. Sainte-Beuve's temperament led him to regard schools, systems, associations, parties, merely in the light of hotels in which he lodged for a time, never completely unpacking his trunk; he was always inclined to depreciate and satirise the one he had just left; hence he now began to write severe and for the most part depreciatory criticism of Hugo's works.
Alfred de Musset had at a still earlier date entertained himself by publishing abroad his defection. A man of such masterly and refined intellect could not be blind to the narrowness and imperfections of the doctrines of the school, still less to the childishness with which they were pushed to extremes by certain Hotspurs among its adherents. When he read aloud his poems for the first time in Hugo's house to an assembly of young Romanticists, only two passages were applauded. The one was the sentence inDon Paez: "Frères, cria de loin un dragon jaune et bleu qui dormait dans du foin." The "yellow and blue" enraptured them; it was what they called colour in style. The other passage was in the description of the huntsmen in "Le lever": a Et sur leur manches vertes les pieds noirs des faucons."
This elementary colour seemed of more value to the youthful audience than all the emotion, passion, and wit of the poems. For it was delineation such as this which distinguished them from the men of the old school, to whom it was only of importance that their readers should learn what happened, not what things were like. To these young men the all-important matter was that for De Musset the visible world existed; but it could not be the most important matter to De Musset himself, whose forte lay in a perfectly different direction, and who felt no desire to compete with Hugo or Théophile Gautier.
De Musset was, moreover, above everything else a young aristocrat, the fashionable man of the world who amused himself with literature in his leisure moments. He had no inclination for the companionship of long-haired poets in Calabrian headgear.
His earliest relations with the public had been of a somewhat uncertain description. He had tried to astonish and provoke it. Now it met him in the most cordial manner, ready, if he would only adopt another attitude towards it, to forgive him everything, even the ballad to the moon. And De Musset, eager to prove his independence, indifferent to parties, averse to dogma, in reality (as his spiritual kinship with Mathurin Régnier and Marivaux shows) classically inclined, yielded to a certain extent to the vague pressure. He captivated the reading world by the air of whimsical superciliousness with which he now wrote of his own and his late comrades' warlike deeds. In his poem, "Les secrètes Pensées de Rafaël, Gentilhomme français," he declares himself weary of the strife; he has, he says, fought on both sides; hundreds of scars have given him a venerable appearance, and he now—at the age of twenty-one—sits like a worn veteran upon his torn drum. Racine and Shakespeare meet upon his table and fall asleep there beside Boileau, who has forgiven them both. In another poem he writes:
"Aujourd'hui l'art n'est plus—personne n'y veut croire.Notre littérature a cent mille raisonsPour parler de noyés, de morts, et de guenilles.Elle-même est un mort que nous galvanisons.Elle entend son affaire en nous peignant des filles,. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Elle-même en est une et la plus délabréeQui de fard et d'onguents se soit jamais plâtrée."
This attack upon the fantastic immorality of the ultra-Romantic literary productions was so youthfully, recklessly sweeping that it seemed to be made upon the whole of contemporary literature. And it was possibly not purely an accident that it was written the same year in whichMarion Delormewas published, that drama which with all its faults is most chaste and spiritual in conception, but which undeniably has a courtesan for its heroine. De Musset at the same time showed plainly that he was becoming ever more and more indifferent to youthful ideals. Almost all the poets of the young school, headed by Hugo, sided with struggling Greece; Alfred de Musset wrote admiringly of his Mardoche that "he had a greater regard for the Porte and Sultan Mahmoud than for the worthy Hellenic nation now staining the white marble of Paros with its blood."
What was the cause of this indifference and supercilious world-weariness?
Blood that was much too hot; a too passionate heart too early disappointed. In his first youth De Musset's faith in his fellow-men had been irreparably shaken, and distrust engendered bitterness and scorn. It is useless to seek the origin of his dark view of life in any single event, though he himself believed that it was to be accounted for by the fact, to which he constantly alludes, that he was betrayed in his early youth by a mistress and a friend. It was no doubt a severe blow to a youth of his honourable, truthful character to find himself thus deceived; but it is also certain that, whilst the wound was still fresh, he examined it through the poetic magnifying glass and made literary capital of it. It was the fashion to have love woes and to succeed in consoling one's self. But De Musset suffered more than many who read his wanton youthful effusions are apt to imagine. To conceal his sensitiveness, to evade the satire of cynics, he for a time affected extreme coldness and hardness. Such affected cynicism makes as unpleasant an impression as any other affectation. Taine wrote a famous essay on De Musset, the admiration in which is as blind as it is touching; it culminates in the exclamation: This man at least never lied! Unless we consider assumed superciliousness and cold-heartedness truthful, we can scarcely endorse the assertion.
But a turning-point in the spoilt, arrogant young man's life was at hand.
On the 15th of August 1833Rollaappeared in what was then a new periodical, theRevue des deux Mondes. A few days afterwards its editor, Buloz, a Swiss, invited his collaborators to a dinner at the famous Palais-Royal restaurant,Les trois frères provençaux. The guests were numerous; among them was one lady. The host, introducing Alfred de Musset to Madame George Sand, requested him to take her in to dinner.
They were a handsome couple. He was slender and refined-looking, fair, with dark eyes, and a sharp, horse-like profile; she was dark, with luxuriant, wavy, black hair, a beautifully smooth, olive skin, faintly tinged with red in the cheeks, large, striking dark eyes, and perfectly shaped arms and hands. One felt that there was a whole world behind that forehead, and yet the lady was young and charming and as silent as if she had no pretensions to intellect. Her dress was simple, though somewhat fantastic; she wore a gold-embroidered Turkish jacket over her bodice and a dagger at her waist.
In Paris in 1870 I heard one of the few surviving guests at this dinner say that it was a piece of peasant cunning, a regular speculation on the part of Buloz, this bringing together of De Musset and George Sand. Buloz had said beforehand to one of his acquaintances: "He shall take her in to dinner. All women fall in love with him; all men consider it their duty to fall in love with her; they will certainly fall in love with each other—what manuscripts I shall get then!" And he rubbed his hands at the thought.
They were two extremely dissimilar beings who sat side by side at this table. Probably the only point of resemblance between them was that they were both authors.
Hers was a fertile, a maternal nature. Her mind was healthy, healthy even in its revolutionary outbursts, richly endowed and well-balanced. Her body was healthy too; she could stand the most fatiguing kind of life, could work most of the night, and content herself with a long morning sleep, which she commanded at will, and from which she awoke refreshed. Every great passion, every revolutionary idea which had moved the nineteenth century, had been housed by this woman in her soul, and yet she had retained her freshness, her tranquillity of mind, and her self-control. She could write calmly and carefully for six hours at a stretch. She had a gift of mental concentration which enabled her to take her pen and transfer her dreams to paper amidst the talking and laughing of a large company as if she were sitting in perfect solitude. And after doing it she would take part in what was going on, smiling, rather taciturn, hearing everything, understanding everything, absorbing everything that was said as a sponge absorbs water.
And he! His was in a far higher degree the artistic temperament. His work was a fever, his sleep was restless, his impulses and passions were uncontrollable. When he conceived an idea he did not sit brooding over it silent and sphinx-like as she did; he was overpowered and trembled, "plus étourdi qu'un page amoureux d'une fée," to quote an expression of his own. And when he seated himself at his desk to work out his idea he was constantly tempted to throw away his pen in despair. The process was so slow; the thoughts came crowding, demanding instant expression; violent palpitation of the heart was the result; and if the smallest temptation presented itself—an invitation to sup with friends and beautiful women, or a proposal to make a country excursion—he fled from his work as men flee from an enemy.