I will not presume to say that I now know the French language well; but
at a time when I knew it even less well than at present,—some fifteen
years ago,—I remember pestering those about me with this sentence, the
rhythm of which had lodged itself in my head, and which, with the
strangest pronunciation possible, I kept perpetually declaiming: “_Les
dieux jaloux ont enfoui quelque part les témoignages de la descendance
des choses; mais au bord de quel Océan ont-ils roulé la pierre qui les
couvre, ô Macarée!_”
These words came from a short composition called the _Centaur_, of which
the author, Georges-Maurice de Guérin, died in the year 1839, at the age
of twenty-eight, without having published anything. In 1840, Madame Sand
brought out the _Centaur_ in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, with a short
notice of its author, and a few extracts from his letters. A year or two
afterwards she reprinted these at the end of a volume of her novels; and
there it was that I fell in with them. I was so much struck with the
_Centaur_ that I waited anxiously to hear something more of its author,
and of what he had left; but it was not till the other day—twenty years
after the first publication of the _Centaur_ in the _Revue des Deux
Mondes_, that my anxiety was satisfied. At the end of 1860 appeared two
volumes with the title _Maurice de Guérin_, _Reliquiæ_, containing the
_Centaur_, several poems of Guérin, his journals, and a number of his
letters, collected and edited by a devoted friend, M. Trebutien, and
preceded by a notice of Guérin by the first of living critics, M.
Sainte-Beuve.
The grand power of poetry is its interpretative power; by which I mean,
not a power of drawing out in black and white an explanation of the
mystery of the universe, but the power of so dealing with things as to
awaken in us a wonderfully full, new, and intimate sense of them, and of
our relations with them. When this sense is awakened in us, as to
objects without us, we feel ourselves to be in contact with the
essential nature of those objects, to be no longer bewildered and
oppressed by them, but to have their secret, and to be in harmony with
them; and this feeling calms and satisfies us as no other can. Poetry,
indeed, interprets in another way besides this; but one of its two ways
of interpreting, of exercising its highest power, is by awakening this
sense in us. I will not now inquire whether this sense is illusive,
whether it can be proved not to be illusive, whether it does absolutely
make us possess the real nature of things; all I say is, that poetry can
awaken it in us, and that to awaken it is one of the highest powers of
poetry. The interpretations of science do not give us this intimate
sense of objects as the interpretations of poetry give it; they appeal
to a limited faculty, and not to the whole man. It is not Linnæus or
Cavendish or Cuvier who gives us the true sense of animals, or water, or
plants, who seizes their secret for us, who makes us participate in
their life; it is Shakspeare, with his
“daffodils
That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty;”
it is Wordsworth, with his
“voice ... heard
In spring-time from the cuckoo-bird
Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides;”
it is Keats, with his
“moving waters at their priestlike task
Of cold ablution round Earth’s human shores;”
it is Chateaubriand, with his, “_cîme indéterminée des forêts_;” it is
Senancour, with his mountain birch-tree: “_Cette écorce blanche, lisse
et crevassée; cette tige agreste; ces branches qui s’inclinent vers la
terre; la mobilité des feuilles, et tout cet abandon, simplicité de la
nature, attitude des déserts._”
Eminent manifestations of this magical power of poetry are very rare and
very precious; the compositions of Guérin manifest it, I think, in
singular eminence. Not his poems, strictly so called,—his verse,—so much
as his prose; his poems in general take for their vehicle that favorite
meter of French poetry, the Alexandrine; and, in my judgment, I confess
they have thus, as compared with his prose, a great disadvantage to
start with. In prose, the character of the vehicle for the composer’s
thoughts is not determined beforehand; every composer has to make his
own vehicle; and who has ever done this more admirably than the great
prose-writers of France,—Pascal, Bossuet, Fénelon, Voltaire? But in
verse the composer has (with comparatively narrow liberty of
modification) to accept his vehicle ready-made; it is therefore of vital
importance to him that he should find at his disposal a vehicle adequate
to convey the highest matters of poetry. We may even get a decisive test
of the poetical power of a language and nation by ascertaining how far
the principal poetical vehicle which they have employed, how far (in
plainer words) the established national meter for high poetry, is
adequate or inadequate. It seems to me that the established meter of
this kind in France,—the Alexandrine,—is inadequate; that as a vehicle
for high poetry it is greatly inferior to the hexameter or to the
iambics of Greece (for example), or to the blank verse of England.
Therefore the man of genius who uses it is at a disadvantage as compared
with the man of genius who has for conveying his thoughts a more
adequate vehicle, metrical or not. Racine is at a disadvantage as
compared with Sophocles or Shakspeare, and he is likewise at a
disadvantage as compared with Bossuet.
The same may be said of our own poets of the eighteenth century, a
century which gave them as the main vehicle for their high poetry
a meter inadequate (as much as the French Alexandrine, and nearly
in the same way) for this poetry,—the ten-syllable couplet. It is
worth remarking, that the English poet of the eighteenth century
whose compositions wear best and give one the most entire
satisfaction,—Gray,—hardly uses that couplet at all: this
abstinence, however, limits Gray’s productions to a few short
compositions, and (exquisite as these are) he is a poetical nature
repressed and without free issue. For English poetical production
on a great scale, for an English poet deploying all the forces of
his genius, the ten-syllable couplet was, in the eighteenth
century, the established, one may almost say the inevitable,
channel. Now this couplet, admirable (as Chaucer uses it) for
story-telling not of the epic pitch, and often admirable for a few
lines even in poetry of a very high pitch, is for continuous use
in poetry of this latter kind inadequate. Pope, in his _Essay on
Man_, is thus at a disadvantage compared with Lucretius in his
poem on Nature: Lucretius has an adequate vehicle, Pope has not.
Nay, though Pope’s genius for didactic poetry was not less than
that of Horace, while his satirical power was certainly greater,
still one’s taste receives, I cannot but think, a certain
satisfaction when one reads the Epistles and Satires of Horace,
which it fails to receive when one reads the Satires and Epistles
of Pope. Of such avail is the superior adequacy of the vehicle
used to compensate even an inferiority of genius in the user! In
the same way Pope is at a disadvantage as compared with Addison.
The best of Addison’s composition (the “Coverley Papers” in the
_Spectator_, for instance) wears better than the best of Pope’s,
because Addison has in his prose an intrinsically better vehicle
for his genius than Pope in his couplet. But Bacon has no such
advantage over Shakspeare; nor has Milton, writing prose (for no
contemporary English prose-writer must be matched with Milton
except Milton himself), any such advantage over Milton writing
verse: indeed, the advantage here is all the other way.
It is in the prose remains of Guérin,—his journals, his letters, and the
striking composition which I have already mentioned, the _Centaur_,—that
his extraordinary gift manifests itself. He has a truly interpretative
faculty; the most profound and delicate sense of the life of Nature, and
the most exquisite felicity in finding expressions to render that sense.
To all who love poetry, Guérin deserves to be something more than a
name; and I shall try, in spite of the impossibility of doing justice to
such a master of expression by translations, to make English readers see
for themselves how gifted an organization his was, and how few artists
have received from Nature a more magical faculty of interpreting her.
In the winter of the year 1832 there was collected in Brittany, around
the well-known Abbé Lamennais, a singular gathering. At a lonely place,
La Chênaie, he had founded a religious retreat, to which disciples,
attracted by his powers or by his reputation, repaired. Some came with
the intention of preparing themselves for the ecclesiastical profession;
others merely to profit by the society and discourse of so distinguished
a master. Among the inmates were men whose names have since become known
to all Europe,—Lacordaire and M. de Montalembert; there were others, who
have acquired a reputation, not European, indeed, but considerable,—the
Abbé Gerbet, the Abbé Rohrbacher; others, who have never quitted the
shade of private life. The winter of 1832 was a period of crisis in the
religious world of France: Lamennais’s rupture with Rome, the
condemnation of his opinions by the Pope, and his revolt against that
condemnation, were imminent. Some of his followers, like Lacordaire, had
already resolved not to cross the Rubicon with their leader, not to go
into rebellion against Rome; they were preparing to separate from him.
The society of La Chênaie was soon to dissolve; but, such as it is shown
to us for a moment, with its voluntary character, its simple and severe
life in common, its mixture of lay and clerical members, the genius of
its chiefs, the sincerity of its disciples,—above all, its paramount
fervent interest in matters of spiritual and religious concernment,—it
offers a most instructive spectacle. It is not the spectacle we most of
us think to find in France, the France we have imagined from common
English notions, from the streets of Paris, from novels; it shows us
how, wherever there is greatness like that of France, there are, as its
foundation, treasures of fervor, pure-mindedness, and spirituality
somewhere, whether we know of them or not;—a store of that which Goethe
calls _Halt_;—since greatness can never be founded upon frivolity and
corruption.
On the evening of the 18th of December in this year 1832, M. de
Lamennais was talking to those assembled in the sitting-room of La
Chênaie of his recent journey to Italy. He talked with all his usual
animation; “but,” writes one of his hearers, a Breton gentleman, M. de
Marzan, “I soon became inattentive and absent, being struck with the
reserved attitude of a young stranger some twenty-two years old, pale in
face, his black hair already thin over his temples, with a southern eye,
in which brightness and melancholy were mingled. He kept himself
somewhat aloof, seeming to avoid notice rather than to court it. All the
old faces of friends which I found about me at this my re-entry into the
circle of La Chênaie failed to occupy me so much as the sight of this
stranger, looking on, listening, observing, and saying nothing.”
The unknown was Maurice de Guérin. Of a noble but poor family, having
lost his mother at six years old, he had been brought up by his father,
a man saddened by his wife’s death, and austerely religious, at the
château of Le Cayla, in Languedoc. His childhood was not gay; he had not
the society of other boys; and solitude, the sight of his father’s
gloom, and the habit of accompanying the curé of the parish on his
rounds among the sick and dying, made him prematurely grave and familiar
with sorrow. He went to school first at Toulouse, then at the Collège
Stanislas at Paris, with a temperament almost as unfit as Shelley’s for
common school life. His youth was ardent, sensitive, agitated, and
unhappy. In 1832 he procured admission to La Chênaie to brace his spirit
by the teaching of Lamennais, and to decide whether his religious
feelings would determine themselves into a distinct religious vocation.
Strong and deep religious feelings he had, implanted in him by nature,
developed in him by the circumstances of his childhood; but he had also
(and here is the key to his character) that temperament which opposes
itself to the fixedness of a religious vocation, or of any vocation of
which fixedness is an essential attribute; a temperament mobile,
inconstant, eager, thirsting for new impressions, abhorring rules,
aspiring to a “renovation without end;” a temperament common enough
among artists, but with which few artists, who have it to the same
degree as Guérin, unite a seriousness and a sad intensity like his.
After leaving school, and before going to La Chênaie, he had been at
home at Le Cayla with his sister Eugénie (a wonderfully gifted person,
whose genius so competent a judge as M. Sainte-Beuve is inclined to
pronounce even superior to her brother’s) and his sister Eugénie’s
friends. With one of these friends he had fallen in love,—a slight and
transient fancy, but which had already called his poetical powers into
exercise; and his poems and fragments, in a certain green note-book (_le
Cahier Vert_) which he long continued to make the depository of his
thoughts, and which became famous among his friends, he brought with him
to La Chênaie. There he found among the younger members of the Society
several who, like himself, had a secret passion for poetry and
literature; with these he became intimate, and in his letters and
journal we find him occupied, now with a literary commerce established
with these friends, now with the fortunes, fast coming to a crisis, of
the Society, and now with that for the sake of which he came to La
Chênaie,—his religious progress and the state of his soul.
On Christmas-day, 1832, having been then three weeks at La Chênaie, he
writes thus of it to a friend of his family, M. de Bayne:—
“La Chênaie is a sort of oasis in the midst of the steppes of Brittany.
In front of the château stretches a very large garden cut in two by a
terrace with a lime avenue, at the end of which is a tiny chapel. I am
extremely fond of this little oratory, where one breathes a twofold
peace,—the peace of solitude and the peace of the Lord. When spring
comes we shall walk to prayers between two borders of flowers. On the
east side, and only a few yards from the château, sleeps a small mere
between two woods, where the birds in warm weather sing all day long;
and then,—right, left, on all sides,—woods, woods, everywhere woods. It
looks desolate just now that all is bare and the woods are rust-color,
and under this Brittany sky, which is always clouded and so low that it
seems as if it were going to fall on your head; but as soon as spring
comes the sky raises itself up, the woods come to life again, and
everything will be full of charm.”
Of what La Chênaie will be when spring comes he has a foretaste on the
3d of March.
“To-day” (he writes in his journal) “has enchanted me. For the first
time for a long while the sun has shown himself in all his beauty. He
has made the buds of the leaves and flowers swell, and he has waked up
in me a thousand happy thoughts. The clouds assume more and more their
light and graceful shapes, and are sketching, over the blue sky, the
most charming fancies. The woods have not yet got their leaves, but they
are taking an indescribable air of life and gaiety, which gives them
quite a new physiognomy. Everything is getting ready for the great
festival of Nature.”
Storm and snow adjourn this festival a little longer. On the 11th of
March he writes:—
“It has snowed all night. I have been to look at our primroses; each of
them has its small load of snow, and was bowing its head under its
burden. These pretty flowers, with their rich yellow color, had a
charming effect under their white hoods. I saw whole tufts of them
roofed over by a single block of snow; all these laughing flowers thus
shrouded and leaning one upon another, made one think of a group of
young girls surprised by a shower, and sheltering under a white apron.”
The burst of spring comes at last, though late. On the 5th of April we
find Guérin “sitting in the sun to penetrate himself to the very marrow
with the divine spring.” On the 3d of May, “one can actually _see_ the
progress of the green; it has made a start from the garden to the
shrubberies, it is getting the upper hand all along the mere; it leaps,
one may say, from tree to tree, from thicket to thicket, in the fields
and on the hillsides; and I can see it already arrived at the forest
edge and beginning to spread itself over the broad back of the forest.
Soon it will have overrun everything as far as the eye can reach, and
all those wide spaces between here and the horizon will be moving and
sounding like one vast sea, a sea of emerald.”
Finally, on the 16th of May, he writes to M. de Bayne that “the gloomy
and bad days,—bad because they bring temptation by their gloom,—are,
thanks to God and the spring, over; and I see approaching a long file of
shining and happy days, to do me all the good in the world. This
Brittany of ours,” he continues, “gives one the idea of the grayest and
most wrinkled old woman possible suddenly changed back by the touch of a
fairy’s wand into a girl of twenty, and one of the loveliest in the
world; the fine weather has so decked and beautified the dear old
country.” He felt, however, the cloudiness and cold of the “dear old
country” with all the sensitiveness of a child of the South. “What a
difference,” he cries, “between the sky of Brittany, even on the finest
day, and the sky of our South! Here the summer has, even on its highdays
and holidays, something mournful, overcast, and stinted about it. It is
like a miser who is making a show; there is a niggardliness in his
magnificence. Give me our Languedoc sky, so bountiful of light, so blue,
so largely vaulted!” And somewhat later, complaining of the short and
dim sunlight of a February day in Paris, “What a sunshine,” he exclaims,
“to gladden eyes accustomed to all the wealth of light of the
South!—_aux larges et libérales effusions de lumière du ciel du Midi_.”
In the long winter of La Chênaie his great resource was literature. One
has often heard that an educated Frenchman’s reading seldom goes much
beyond French and Latin, and that he makes the authors in these two
languages his sole literary standard. This may or may not be true of
Frenchmen in general, but there can be no question as to the width of
the reading of Guérin and his friends, and as to the range of their
literary sympathies. One of the circle, Hippolyte la Morvonnais,—a poet
who published a volume of verse, and died in the prime of life,—had a
passionate admiration for Wordsworth, and had even, it is said, made a
pilgrimage to Rydal Mount to visit him; and in Guérin’s own reading I
find, besides the French names of Bernardin de St. Pierre,
Chateaubriand, Lamartine, and Victor Hugo, the names of Homer, Dante,
Shakspeare, Milton, and Goethe; and he quotes both from Greek and from
English authors in the original. His literary tact is beautifully fine
and true. “Every poet,” he writes to his sister, “has his own art of
poetry written on the ground of his own soul; there is no other. Be
constantly observing Nature in her smallest details, and then write as
the current of your thoughts guides you;—that is all.” But with all this
freedom from the bondage of forms and rules, Guérin marks with perfect
precision the faults of the _free_ French literature of his time,—the
_littérature facile_,—and judges the romantic school and its prospects
like a master: “that youthful literature which has put forth all its
blossom prematurely, and has left itself a helpless prey to the
returning frost, stimulated as it has been by the burning sun of our
century, by this atmosphere charged with a perilous heat, which has
overhastened every sort of development, and will most likely reduce to a
handful of grains the harvest of our age.” And the popular
authors,—those “whose name appears once and disappears forever, whose
books, unwelcome to all serious people, welcome to the rest of the
world, to novelty-hunters and novel-readers, fill with vanity these vain
souls, and then, falling from hands heavy with the languor of satiety,
drop forever into the gulf of oblivion;” and those, more noteworthy,
“the writers of books celebrated, and, as works of art, deserving
celebrity, but which have in them not one grain of that hidden manna,
not one of those sweet and wholesome thoughts which nourish the human
soul and refresh it when it is weary,”—these he treats with such
severity that he may in some sense be described, as he describes
himself, as “invoking with his whole heart a classical restoration.” He
is best described, however, not as a partisan of any school, but as an
ardent seeker for that mode of expression which is the most natural,
happy, and true. He writes to his sister Eugénie:—
“I want you to reform your system of composition; it is too loose, too
vague, too Lamartinian. Your verse is too sing-song; it does not _talk_
enough. Form for yourself a style of your own, which shall be your real
expression. Study the French language by attentive reading, making it
your care to remark constructions, turns of expression, delicacies of
style, but without ever adopting the manner of any master. In the works
of these masters we must learn our language, but we must use it each in
our own fashion.”[10]
-----
Footnote 10:
Part of these extracts date from a time a little after Guérin’s
residence at La Chênaie; but already, amidst the readings and
conversations of La Chênaie, his literary judgment was perfectly
formed.
-----
It was not, however, to perfect his literary judgment that Guérin came
to La Chênaie. The religious feeling, which was as much a part of his
essence as the passion for Nature and the literary instinct, shows
itself at moments jealous of these its rivals, and alarmed at their
predominance. Like all powerful feelings, it wants to exclude every
other feeling and to be absolute. One Friday in April, after he has been
delighting himself with the shapes of the clouds and the progress of the
spring, he suddenly bethinks himself that the day is Good Friday, and
exclaims in his diary:—
“My God, what is my soul about that it can thus go running after such
fugitive delights on Good Friday, on this day all filled with thy death
and our redemption? There is in me I know not what damnable spirit, that
awakens in me strong discontents, and is forever prompting me to rebel
against the holy exercises and the devout collectedness of soul which
are the meet preparation for these great solemnities of our faith. Oh
how well can I trace here the old leaven, from which I have not yet
perfectly cleared my soul!”
And again, in a letter to M. de Marzan: “Of what, my God, are we made,”
he cries, “that a little verdure and a few trees should be enough to rob
us of our tranquillity and to distract us from thy love?” And writing,
three days after Easter Sunday, in his journal he records the reception
at La Chênaie of a fervent neophyte, in words which seem to convey a
covert blame of his own want of fervency:—
“Three days have passed over our heads since the great festival. One
anniversary the less for us yet to spend of the death and resurrection
of our Saviour! Every year thus bears away with it its solemn festivals;
when will the everlasting festival be here? I have been witness of a
most touching sight; François has brought us one of his friends whom he
has gained to the faith. This neophyte joined us in our exercises during
the Holy week, and on Easter day he received the communion with us.
François was in raptures. It is a truly good work which he has thus
done. François is quite young, hardly twenty years old; M. de la M. is
thirty, and is married. There is something most touching and beautifully
simple in M. de la M. letting himself thus be brought to God by quite a
young man; and to see friendship, on François’s side, thus doing the
work of an Apostle, is not less beautiful and touching.”
Admiration for Lamennais worked in the same direction with this feeling.
Lamennais never appreciated Guérin; his combative, rigid, despotic
nature, of which the characteristic was energy, had no affinity with
Guérin’s elusive, undulating, impalpable nature, of which the
characteristic was delicacy. He set little store by his new disciple,
and could hardly bring himself to understand what others found so
remarkable in him, his own genuine feeling towards him being one of
indulgent compassion. But the intuition of Guérin, more discerning than
the logic of his master, instinctively felt what there was commanding
and tragic in Lamennais’s character, different as this was from his own;
and some of his notes are among the most interesting records of
Lamennais which remain.
“‘Do you know what it is,’ M. Féli[11] said to us on the evening of the
day before yesterday, ‘which makes man the most suffering of all
creatures? It is that he has one foot in the finite and the other in the
infinite, and that he is torn asunder, not by four horses, as in the
horrible old times, but between two worlds.’ Again he said to us as we
heard the clock strike: ‘If that clock knew that it was to be destroyed
the next instant, it would still keep striking its hour until that
instant arrived. My children, be as the clock; whatever may be going to
happen to you, strike always your hour.’”
-----
Footnote 11:
The familiar name given to M. de Lamennais by his followers at La
Chênaie.
-----
Another time Guérin writes:
“To-day M. Féli startled us. He was sitting behind the chapel, under the
two Scotch firs; he took his stick and marked out a grave on the turf,
and said to Elie, ‘It is there I wish to be buried, but no tombstone!
only a simple hillock of grass. Oh, how well I shall be there!’ Elie
thought he had a presentiment that his end was near. This is not the
first time he has been visited by such a presentiment; when he was
setting out for Rome, he said to those here: ‘I do not expect ever to
come back to you; you must do the good which I have failed to do.’ He is
impatient for death.”
Overpowered by the ascendency of Lamennais, Guérin, in spite of his
hesitations, in spite of his confession to himself that, “after a three
weeks’ close scrutiny of his soul, in the hope of finding the pearl of a
religious vocation hidden in some corner of it,” he had failed to find
what he sought, took, at the end of August 1833, a decisive step. He
joined the religious order which Lamennais had founded. But at this very
moment the deepening displeasure of Rome with Lamennais determined the
Bishop of Rennes to break up, in so far as it was a religious
congregation, the Society of La Chênaie, to transfer the novices to
Ploërmel, and to place them under other superintendence. In September,
Lamennais, “who had not yet ceased,” writes M. de Marzan, a faithful
Catholic, “to be a Christian and a priest, took leave of his beloved
colony of La Chênaie, with the anguish of a general who disbands his
army down to the last recruit, and withdraws annihilated from the field
of battle.” Guérin went to Ploërmel. But here, in the seclusion of a
real religious house, he instantly perceived how alien to a spirit like
his,—a spirit which, as he himself says somewhere, “had need of the open
air, wanted to see the sun and the flowers,”—was the constraint and the
monotony of a monastic life, when Lamennais’s genius was no longer
present to enliven this life for him. On the 7th of October he renounced
the novitiate, believing himself a partisan of Lamennais in his quarrel
with Rome, reproaching the life he had left with demanding passive
obedience instead of trying “to put in practice the admirable alliance
of order with liberty, and of variety with unity,” and declaring that,
for his part, he preferred taking the chances of a life of adventure to
submitting himself to be “_garotté par un réglement_,—tied hand and foot
by a set of rules.” In real truth, a life of adventure, or rather a life
free to wander at its own will, was that to which his nature
irresistibly impelled him.
For a career of adventure, the inevitable field was Paris. But before
this career began, there came a stage, the smoothest, perhaps, and the
most happy in the short life of Guérin. M. la Morvonnais, one of his La
Chênaie friends,—some years older than Guérin, and married to a wife of
singular sweetness and charm,—had a house by the seaside at the mouth of
one of the beautiful rivers of Brittany, the Arguenon. He asked Guérin,
when he left Ploërmel, to come and stay with him at this place, called
Le Val de l’Arguenon, and Guérin spent the winter of 1833-4 there. I
grudge every word about Le Val and its inmates which is not Guérin’s
own, so charming is the picture drawn of them, so truly does his talent
find itself in its best vein as he draws it.
“How full of goodness” (he writes in his journal of the 7th of December)
“is Providence to me! For fear the sudden passage from the mild and
temperate air of a religious life to the torrid clime of the world
should be too trying to my soul, it has conducted me, after I have left
my sacred shelter, to a house planted on the frontier between the two
regions, where, without being in solitude, one is not yet in the world;
a house whose windows look on the one side towards the plain where the
tumult of men is rocking, on the other towards the wilderness where the
servants of God are chanting. I intend to write down the record of my
sojourn here, for the days here spent are full of happiness, and I know
that in the time to come I shall often turn back to the story of these
past felicities. A man, pious, and a poet; a woman, whose spirit is in
such perfect sympathy with his that you would say they had but one being
between them; a child, called Marie like her mother, and who sends, like
a star, the first rays of her love and thought through the white cloud
of infancy; a simple life in an old-fashioned house; the ocean, which
comes morning and evening to bring us its harmonies; and lastly, a
wanderer who descends from Carmel and is going to Babylon, and who has
laid down at this threshold his staff and his sandals, to take his seat
at the hospitable table;—here is matter to make a biblical poem of, if I
could only describe things as I can feel them!”
Every line written by Guérin during this stay at Le Val is worth
quoting, but I have only room for one extract more:
“Never” (he writes, a fortnight later, on the 20th of December), “never
have I tasted so inwardly and deeply the happiness of home-life. All the
little details of this life, which in their succession makes up the day,
are to me so many stages of a continuous charm carried from one end of
the day to the other. The morning greeting, which in some sort renews
the pleasure of the first arrival, for the words with which one meets
are almost the same, and the separation at night, through the hours of
darkness and uncertainty, does not ill represent longer separations;
then breakfast, during which you have the fresh enjoyment of having met
together again; the stroll afterwards, when we go out and bid Nature
good morning; the return and setting to work in an old paneled chamber
looking out on the sea, inaccessible to all the stir of the house, a
perfect sanctuary of labor; dinner, to which we are called, not by a
bell, which reminds one too much of school or a great house, but by a
pleasant voice; the gaiety, the merriment, the talk flitting from one
subject to another and never dropping so long as the meal lasts; the
crackling fire of dry branches to which we draw our chairs directly
afterwards, the kind words that are spoken round the warm flame which
sings while we talk; and then, if it is fine, the walk by the seaside,
when the sea has for its visitors a mother with her child in her arms,
this child’s father and a stranger, each of these two last with a stick
in his hand; the rosy lips of the little girl, which keep talking at the
same time with the waves,—now and then tears shed by her and cries of
childish fright at the edge of the sea; our thoughts, the father’s and
mine, as we stand and look at the mother and child smiling at one
another, or at the child in tears and the mother trying to comfort it by
her caresses and exhortations; the Ocean, going on all the while rolling
up his waves and noises; the dead boughs which we go and cut, here and
there, out of the copse-wood, to make a quick and bright fire when we
get home,—this little taste of the woodman’s calling which brings us
closer to Nature and makes us think of M. Féli’s eager fondness for the
same work; the hours of study and poetical flow which carry us to
supper-time; this meal, which summons us by the same gentle voice as its
predecessor, and which is passed amid the same joys, only less loud,
because evening sobers everything, tones everything down; then our
evening, ushered in by the blaze of a cheerful fire, and which with its
alternations of reading and talking brings us at last to bed-time:—to
all the charms of a day so spent add the dreams which follow it, and
your imagination will still fall far short of these home-joys in their
delightful reality.”
I said the foregoing should be my last extract, but who could resist
this picture of a January evening on the coast of Brittany?—
“All the sky is covered over with gray clouds just silvered at the
edges. The sun, who departed a few minutes ago, has left behind him
enough light to temper for awhile the black shadows, and to soften down,
as it were, the approach of night. The winds are hushed, and the
tranquil ocean sends up to me, when I go out on the doorstep to listen,
only a melodious murmur, which dies away in the soul like a beautiful
wave on the beach. The birds, the first to obey the nocturnal influence,
make their way towards the woods, and you hear the rustle of their wings
in the clouds. The copses which cover the whole hillside of Le Val,
which all the day-time are alive with the chirp of the wren, the
laughing whistle of the woodpecker,[12] and the different notes of a
multitude of birds, have no longer any sound in their paths and
thickets, unless it be the prolonged high call of the blackbirds at play
with one another and chasing one another, after all the other birds have
their heads safe under their wings. The noise of man, always the last to
be silent, dies gradually out over the face of the fields. The general
murmur fades away, and one hears hardly a sound except what comes from
the villages and hamlets, in which, up till far into the night, there
are cries of children and barking of dogs. Silence wraps me round;
everything seeks repose except this pen of mine, which perhaps disturbs
the rest of some living atom asleep in a crease of my note-book, for it
makes its light scratching as it puts down these idle thoughts. Let it
stop, then! for all I write, have written, or shall write, will never be
worth setting against the sleep of an atom.”
-----
Footnote 12:
“The woodpecker _laughs_,” says White of Selborne; and here is Guérin,
in Brittany, confirming his testimony.
-----
On the 1st of February we find him in a lodging at Paris. “I enter the
world” (such are the last words written in his journal at Le Val) “with
a secret horror.” His outward history for the next five years is soon
told. He found himself in Paris, poor, fastidious, and with health which
already, no doubt, felt the obscure presence of the malady of which he
died—consumption. One of his Brittany acquaintances introduced him to
editors, tried to engage him in the periodical literature of Paris; and
so unmistakable was Guérin’s talent that even his first essays were
immediately accepted. But Guérin’s genius was of a kind which unfitted
him to get his bread in this manner. At first he was pleased with the
notion of living by his pen; “_je n’ai qu’à écrire_,” he says to his
sister,—“I have only got to write.” But to a nature like his, endued
with the passion for perfection, the necessity to produce, to produce
constantly, to produce whether in the vein or out of the vein, to
produce something good or bad or middling, as it may happen, but at all
events _something_,—is the most intolerable of tortures. To escape from
it he betook himself to that common but most perfidious refuge of men of
letters, that refuge to which Goldsmith and poor Hartley Coleridge had
betaken themselves before him,—the profession of teaching. In September,
1834, he procured an engagement at the Collège Stanislas, where he had
himself been educated. It was vacation-time, and all he had to do was to
teach a small class composed of boys who did not go home for the
holidays,—in his own words, “scholars left like sick sheep in the fold,
while the rest of the flock are frisking in the fields.” After the
vacation he was kept on at the college as a supernumerary. “The master
of the fifth class has asked for a month’s leave of absence; I am taking
his place, and by this work I get one hundred francs (£4). I have been
looking about for pupils to give private lessons to, and I have found
three or four. Schoolwork and private lessons together fill my day from
half-past seven in the morning till half-past nine at night. The college
dinner serves me for breakfast, and I go and dine in the evening at
twenty-four _sous_, as a young man beginning life should.” To better his
position in the hierarchy of public teachers it was necessary that he
should take the degree of _agrégé-èslettres_, corresponding to our
degree of Master of Arts; and to his heavy work in teaching, there was
thus added that of preparing for a severe examination. The drudgery of
this life was very irksome to him, although less insupportable than the
drudgery of the profession of letters; inasmuch as to a sensitive man
like Guérin, to silence his genius is more tolerable than to hackney it.
Still the yoke wore him deeply, and he had moments of bitter revolt; he
continued, however, to bear it with resolution, and on the whole with
patience, for four years. On the 15th of November, 1838, he married a
young Creole lady of some fortune, Mademoiselle Caroline de Gervain,
“whom,” to use his own words, “Destiny, who loves these surprises, has
wafted from the farthest Indies into my arms.” The marriage was happy,
and it insured to Guérin liberty and leisure; but now “the blind Fury
with the abhorred shears” was hard at hand. Consumption declared itself
in him: “I pass my life,” he writes, with his old playfulness and calm,
to his sister on the 8th of April, 1839, “within my bed-curtains, and
wait patiently enough, thanks to Caro’s[13] goodness, books, and dreams,
for the recovery which the sunshine is to bring with it.” In search of
this sunshine he was taken to his native country, Languedoc, but in
vain. He died at Le Cayla on the 19th of July, 1839.
-----
Footnote 13:
His wife.
-----
The vicissitudes of his inward life during these five years were
more considerable. His opinions and tastes underwent great, or what
seem to be great, changes. He came to Paris the ardent partisan of
Lamennais: even in April, 1834, after Rome had finally condemned
Lamennais,—“To-night there will go forth from Paris,” he writes,
“with his face set to the west, a man whose every step I would fain
follow, and who returns to the desert for which I sigh. M. Féli
departs this evening for La Chênaie.” But in October, 1835,—“I
assure you,” he writes to his sister, “I am at last weaned from M.
de Lamennais; one does not remain a babe and suckling for ever; I am
perfectly freed from his influence.” There was a greater change than
this. In 1834 the main cause of Guérin’s aversion to the literature
of the French romantic school, was that this literature, having had
a religious origin, had ceased to be religious: “it has forgotten,”
he says, “the house and the admonitions of its Father.” But his
friend M. de Marzan tells us of a “deplorable revolution” which, by
1836, had taken place in him. Guérin had become intimate with the
chiefs of this very literature; he no longer went to church; “the
bond of a common faith, in which our friendship had its birth,
existed between us no longer.” Then, again, “this interregnum was
not destined to last.” Reconverted to his old faith by suffering and
by the pious efforts of his sister Eugénie, Guérin died a Catholic.
His feelings about society underwent a like change. After “entering
the world with a secret horror,” after congratulating himself when
he had been some months at Paris on being “disengaged from the
social tumult, out of the reach of those blows which, when I live in
the thick of the world, bruise me, irritate me, or utterly crush
me,” M. Sainte-Beuve tells us of him, two years afterwards,
appearing in society “a man of the world, elegant, even fashionable;
a talker who could hold his own against the most brilliant talkers
of Paris.”
In few natures, however, is there really such essential consistency as
in Guérin’s. He says of himself, in the very beginning of his journal:
“I owe everything to poetry, for there is no other name to give to the
sum total of my thoughts; I owe to it whatever I now have pure, lofty
and solid in my soul; I owe to it all my consolations in the past; I
shall probably owe to it my future.” Poetry, the poetical instinct, was
indeed the basis of his nature; but to say so thus absolutely is not
quite enough. One aspect of poetry fascinated Guérin’s imagination and
held it prisoner. Poetry is the interpretress of the natural world, and
she is the interpretress of the moral world; it was as the interpretress
of the natural world that she had Guérin for her mouthpiece. To make
magically near and real the life of Nature, and man’s life only so far
as it is a part of that Nature, was his faculty; a faculty of
naturalistic, not of moral interpretation. This faculty always has for
its basis a peculiar temperament, an extraordinary delicacy of
organization and susceptibility to impressions; in exercising it the
poet is in a great degree passive (Wordsworth thus speaks of a _wise
passiveness_); he aspires to be a sort of human Æolian harp, catching
and rendering every rustle of Nature. To assist at the evolution of the
whole life of the world is his craving, and intimately to feel it all:
... “The glow, the thrill of life,
Where, where do these abound?”
is what he asks: he resists being riveted and held stationary by any
single impression, but would be borne on forever down an enchanted
stream. He goes into religion and out of religion into society and out
of society, not from the motives which impel men in general, but to feel
what it is all like; he is thus hardly a moral agent, and, like the
passive and ineffectual Uranus of Keats’s poem, he may say:
... “I am but a voice;
My life is but the life of winds and tides;
No more than winds and tides can I avail.”
He hovers over the tumult of life, but does not really put his hand to
it.
No one has expressed the aspirations of this temperament better than
Guérin himself. In the last year of his life he writes:—
“I return, as you see, to my old brooding over the world of Nature, that
line which my thoughts, irresistibly take; a sort of passion which gives
me enthusiasm, tears, bursts of joy, and an eternal food for musing; and
yet I am neither philosopher nor naturalist, nor anything learned
whatsoever. There is one word which is the God of my imagination, the
tyrant, I ought rather to say, that fascinates it, lures it onward,
gives it work to do without ceasing, and will finally carry it I know
not where; the word _life_.”