'_Sept._, 1839.
'"La harpe tremble encore, et la flûte soupire."
'Sometimes we doubt this, and think the music has finally
ceased, so sultry still lies the air around us, or only
disturbed by the fife and drum of talent, calling to the
parade-ground of social life. The ear grows dull.
'"Faith asks her daily bread,
And Fancy is no longer fed."
'So materialistic is the course of common life, that we _ask
daily_ new Messiahs from literature and art, to turn us from
the Pharisaic observance of law, to the baptism of spirit. But
stars arise upon our murky sky, and the flute _soupire_ from
the quarter where we least expect it.
'_La jeune France_! I had not believed in this youthful
pretender. I thought she had no pure blood in her veins, no
aristocratic features in her face, no natural grace in her
gait. I thought her an illegitimate child of the generous, but
extravagant youth of Germany. I thought she had been left at
the foundling hospital, as not worth a parent's care, and that
now, grown up, she was trying to prove at once her parentage
and her charms by certificates which might be headed, Innocent
Adultery, Celestial Crime, &c.
'The slight acquaintance I had with Hugo, and company, did not
dispel these impressions. And I thought Chateaubriand (far too
French for my taste also,) belonged to _l'ancien régime_, and
that Béranger and Courier stood apart. Nodier, Paul de Kock,
Sue, Jules Janin, I did not know, except through the absurd
reports of English reviewers; Le Maistre and Lamennais, as
little.
'But I have now got a peep at this galaxy. I begin to divine
the meaning of St. Simonianism, Cousinism, and the movement
which the same causes have produced in belles-lettres. I
perceive that _la jeune France_ is the legitimate, though far
younger sister of Germany; taught by her, but not born of her,
but of a common mother. I see, at least begin to see, what
she has learned from England, and what the bloody rain of
the revolution has done to fertilize her soil, naturally too
light.
'Blessed be the early days when I sat at the feet of Rousseau,
prophet sad and stately as any of Jewry! Every onward movement
of the age, every downward step into the solemn depths of my
own soul, recalls thy oracles, O Jean Jacques! But as these
things only glimmer upon me at present, clouds of rose and
amber, in the perspective of a long, dim woodland glade, which
I must traverse if I would get a fair look at them from the
hill-top,--as I cannot, to say sooth, get the works of these
always working geniuses, but by slow degrees, in a country
that has no heed of them till her railroads and canals are
finished,--I need not jot down my petty impressions of the
movement writers. I wish to speak of one among them, aided,
honored by them, but not of them. He is to _la jeune France_
rather the herald of a tourney, or the master of ceremonies
at a patriotic festival, than a warrior for her battles, or an
advocate to win her cause.
'The works of M. de Vigny having come in my way, I have read
quite through this thick volume.
'I read, a year since, in the London and Westminster,
an admirable sketch of Armand Carrel. The writer speaks
particularly of the use of which Carrel's experience of
practical life had been to him as an author; how it had
tempered and sharpened the blade of his intellect to the
Damascene perfection. It has been of like use to de Vigny,
though not in equal degree.
'De Vigny _passed_,--but for manly steadfastness, he would
probably say _wasted_,--his best years in the army. He is now
about forty; and we have in this book the flower of these best
years. It is a night-blooming Cereus, for his days were passed
in the duties of his profession. These duties, so tiresome and
unprofitable in time of peace, were the ground in which the
seed sprang up, which produced these many-leaved and calm
night-flowers.
'The first portion of this volume, _Servitude et Grandeurs
Militaires_, contains an account of the way in which he
received his false tendency. Cherished on the "wounded
knees" of his aged father, he listened to tales of the great
Frederic, whom the veteran had known personally. After an
excellent sketch of the king, he says: "I expatiate here,
almost in spite of myself, because this was the first great
man whose portrait was thus drawn for me at home,--a portrait
after nature,--and because my admiration of him was the first
symptom of my useless love of arms,--the first cause of one of
the most complete delusions of my life." This admiration
for the great king remained so lively in his mind, that even
Bonaparte in his gestures seemed to him, in later days, a
plagiarist.
'At the military school, "the drum stifled the voices of our
masters, and the mysterious voices of books seemed to us cold
and pedantic. Tropes and logarithms seemed to us only steps to
mount to the star of the Legion of Honor,--the fairest star of
heaven to us children."
'"No meditation could keep long in chains heads made
constantly giddy by the noise of cannon and bells for the _Te
Deum_. When one of our former comrades returned to pay us a
visit in uniform, and his arm in a scarf, we blushed at
our books, and threw them at the heads of our teachers. Our
teachers were always reading us bulletins from the _grande
armée_, and our cries of _Vive l'Empereur_ interrupted Tacitus
and Plato. Our preceptors resembled heralds of arms, our study
halls barracks, and our examinations reviews."
'Thus was he led into the army; and, he says, "It was only
very late, that I perceived that my services were one long
mistake, and that I had imported into a life altogether
active, a nature altogether contemplative."
'He entered the army at the time of Napoleon's fall, and,
like others, wasted life in waiting for war. For these young
persons could not believe that peace and calm were possible to
France; could not believe that she could lead any life but one
of conquest.
'As De Vigny was gradually undeceived, he says: "Loaded with
an ennui which I did not dream of in a life I had so ardently
desired, it became a necessity to me to detach myself by night
from the vain and tiresome tumult of military days. From these
nights, in which I enlarged in silence the knowledge I had
acquired from our public and tumultuous studies, proceeded
my poems and books. From these days, there remain to me these
recollections, whose chief traits I here assemble around one
idea. For, not reckoning for the glory of arms, either on
the present or future, I sought it in the souvenirs of my
comrades. My own little adventures will not serve, except
as frame to those pictures of the military life, and of
the manners of our armies, all whose traits are by no means
known."
'And thus springs up, in the most natural manner, this little
book on the army.
'It has the truth, the delicacy, and the healthiness of a
production native to the soil; the merit of love-letters,
journals, lyric poems, &c., written without any formal
intention of turning life into a book, but because the writer
could not help it. What, more than anything else, engaged the
attention of De Vigny, was the false position of two beings
towards a factitious society: the soldier, now that standing
armies are the mode, and the poet, now that Olympic games
or pastimes are not the mode. He has treated the first best,
because with profounder _connoissance du fait_. For De Vigny
is not a poet; he has only an eye to perceive the existence
of these birds of heaven. But in few ways, except their own
broken harp-tone's thrill, have their peculiar sorrows and
difficulties been so well illustrated. The character of the
soldier, with its virtues and faults, is portrayed with such
delicacy, that to condense would ruin. The peculiar reserve,
the habit of duty, the beauty of a character which cannot look
forward, and need not look back, are given with distinguished
finesse.
'Of the three stories which adorn this part of the book,
_Le Cachet Rouge_ is the loveliest, _La Canne au Jonc_ the
noblest. Never was anything more sweetly naïve than parts of
_Le Cachet Rouge_. _La pauvre petite femme_, she was just such
a person as my ----. And then the farewell injunctions,--_du
pauvre petite maré_,--the nobleness and the coarseness of
the poor captain. It is as original as beautiful, _c'est dire
beaucoup_. In _La Canne au Jonc_, Collingwood, who embodies
the high feeling of duty, is taken too raw out of a book,--his
letters to his daughters. But the effect on the character of
_le Capitaine Renaud_, and the unfolding of his interior life,
are done with the spiritual beauty of Manzoni.
'_Cinq-Mars_ is a romance in the style of Walter Scott. It
is well brought out, figures in good relief, lights well
distributed, sentiment high, but nowhere exaggerated,
knowledge exact, and the good and bad of human nature painted
with that impartiality which becomes a man, and a man of the
world. All right, no failure anywhere; also, no wonderful
success, no genius, no magic. It is one of those works which
I should consider only excusable as the amusement of leisure
hours; and, though few could write it, chiefly valuable to the
writer.
'Here he has arranged, as in a bouquet, what he knew,--and a
great deal it is,--of the time of Louis XIII., as he has of
the Regency in "La Marechale d'Ancre,"--a much finer work,
indeed one of the best-arranged and finished modern dramas.
The Leonora Galigai is better than anything I have seen in
Victor Hugo, and as good as Schiller. Stello is a bolder
attempt. It is the history of three poets,--Gilbert, André
Chenier, Chatterton. He has also written a drama called
Chatterton, inferior to the story here. The "marvellous boy"
seems to have captivated his imagination marvellously. In
thought, these productions are worthless; for taste, beauty of
sentiment, and power of description, remarkable. His advocacy
of the poets' cause is about as effective and well-planned
as Don Quixote's tourney with the wind-mill. How would you
provide for the poet _bon homme_ De Vigny?--from a joint-stock
company Poet's Fund, or how?
'His translation of Othello, which I glanced at, is good for a
Frenchman.
'Among his poems, La Frégate, La Sérieuse, Madame de Soubise,
and Dolorida, please me especially. The last has an elegiac
sweetness and finish, which are rare. It also makes a perfect
gem of a cabinet picture. Some have a fine strain of natural
melody, and give you at once the key-note of the situation, as
this:--
'"J'aime le son du cor le soir, au fond des bois,
Soit qu'il chante," &c.