notice of him, we allot to Chateaubriand, fails indeed to represent by
symbol to the eye the proportionate space that he occupies in the
literature of his country. But it has afforded us fairly adequate
opportunity to exhibit in description and specimen the characteristic
quality of his literary production.
XXI.
BERANGER.
1780-1857.
Beranger was a song-writer, the whole of him. He was a song-writer and
nothing else. It is his own word, "My songs, they are myself."
Beranger was not the rose-crowned lyrist of love and wine; he was not
Anacreon. Beranger was not the hymner of heroes and kings, a maker of
odes; he was not Pindar. Beranger was not the poet of the world, the gay
world and the wise; he was not Horace. Beranger was not by chance the
lowly melodist, who might by chance as well have been a lofty bard; he
was not Robert Burns. Beranger was the song-singer of the people; he
himself elected to be such, and he was by the people elected to be such;
he said himself, "My muse is the people." In one word, Beranger
was--Beranger. There was none like him before, there has been none like
him since; Beranger is alone. We do not thus praise him, we simply
describe him.
But it is possible to describe him better. We do so by borrowing from
Victor Hugo through Sainte-Beuve.
Sainte-Beuve, not in his essay on Beranger (which, in appreciating,
somewhat depreciates the poet), but among the interesting things that,
under the title "Chateaubriana," he prints at the close of his monograph
in two volumes on Chateaubriand, has the following personal recollection
of his own, which, given here, will serve a threefold purpose; that of
hinting incidentally the relation of four celebrated French authors to
one another, that of illustrating the ready fecundity and plasticity of
Victor Hugo's genius, and that of setting forth in concrete example
Beranger's master method in his songs, which master method is
essentially Beranger, the song-writer, himself. Sainte-Beuve says--of
course we translate:
Victor Hugo, returning one morning from the garden of the Luxembourg
(1828 or 1829) said to me: "If I should see Beranger, I would give him
the subject of a pretty song. I just now met M. de Chateaubriand in
the Luxembourg; he did not see me; he was wrapt in thought, intently
observing some children who, seated on the ground, were playing and
tracing figures in the sand. If I were Beranger I would make a song on
the subject: 'I have been minister, I have been ambassador, etc., I
wear the decoration of the Order of the Holy Ghost, that of the Order
of the Golden Fleece, that of the order of St. Andrew, etc.; and one
sole thing at last amuses me: it is to watch children playing in the
sand. I wrote "Rene," I wrote the "Genius of Christianity," I stood up
against Napoleon, I opened the poetic era of the century, etc.; and I
know only one thing that amuses me: to watch children at play upon the
sand. I have seen America, I have seen Greece and Rome, I have seen
Jerusalem, etc.' And after each enumeration of various experiences,
forms of greatness or of honor, all kept returning still to this: to
watch children playing and tracing circles in the sand." The plan
sketched by Victor Hugo was perfect, far better than I have given it
here; but the motive is plain, the idea of the refrain. Never have I
had better defined to me the difference that separates the song, even
the most elevated in character, from the ode properly so-called.
There is Beranger, his whole secret, summed up in small by a masterhand.
What Beranger, then, did was to choose wisely, with long heed, some
single, simple, obvious sentiment, appealing to every body's experience,
shut that sentiment up into a short, neat, striking, rememberable form
of words suited to be sung, make of that form of words a refrain to
recur at intervals, and finally on that refrain build up, one after
another to the end, the stanzas of his song. He worked slowly and
painfully. His genius was never very prolific. The time of his chief
fruitfulness was short, covering only fifteen years, the fifteen years
between Waterloo (1815) and the elevation of Louis Philippe to the
throne of France (1830). During this time his largest product hardly
exceeded a dozen songs a year.
Beranger's first discipline to his art may be considered to have been a
certain favorite diversion of his childhood, the carving of
cherry-stones. This exercise of skill he practiced sedulously with
delight when a boy, and in it learned the long, minute patience of art.
The man's songs were cut gems laboriously finished, like the boy's
carvings in cherry-stones.
Beranger became immensely popular. He remained so to the end. When he
died, and it was after prolonged silence on his part--if one can call
silence a period marked, indeed, by non-production, but filled with the
singing, from land's end to land's end, of his songs in every
mouth--when he died the empire buried him and the nation attended his
funeral. He had been born poor, and he was reared in poverty. Rich he
would not be, when a man. He took infinite pains to be of the people,
and he succeeded. The people were loving and honoring themselves in
loving and honoring Beranger. Sainte-Beuve, with that critical
incredulity of his, thought that Beranger carried his demonstrative
cultivation of the "people" to the point of something like affectation.
Perhaps; but the affectation, if it was such, had a sound basis in it of
real instinctive popular sympathy. Still, Beranger's emphasized
identification of himself with the people was not all a matter of
instinct with him. It was in part a matter of deliberately adopted
policy. He said:
The people wanted a man to speak to them the language they love and
understand, and to create imitators to vary and multiply versions of
the same text. _I have been that man._
Beranger was quite willing to make any moral descent that might seem to
him necessary in order to reach his audience. He may have been
instinctively, but he was also deliberately, low and lewd in some of his
songs.
Without their help [said he, that is without the help of such immoral
songs] I am disposed to think that the others would not have been able
to go so far, or so low, or even so high; no offense in this last word
to the virtues of good society.
Even the best of Beranger's songs lack any thing like lift and
aspiration. They are conceived in a comparatively low tone. The noblest
leaven in them is love of France and of liberty. Beranger hated the
Bourbons; they persecuted him, but that only helped him sing them off
the throne of France. Beranger's songs did more than any other one
individual influence, perhaps they did more than all other individual
influences combined, first to overturn the restored Bourbon dynasty
after Waterloo, and, second, to bring about the elevation of Louis
Napoleon to power.
For Beranger was a passionate admirer of the great Napoleon. True, he
deprecated the exhaustions visited on France by the wars of glory which
Napoleon waged. But that famous piece of his, "The King of Yvetot," in
which this deprecation found voice, was a protest so lightly conceived
and at bottom so genial, that the jealousy of Napoleon himself could
afford to laugh at it. The pieces in which, on the contrary, he
celebrated the praises of the emperor were written with an emotion
contagiously vivid. Let us now have before us "The King of Yvetot," with
an appropriate contrast to it afterward supplied in one of these
encomiastic pieces.
"Yvetot" is the name of an ancient French town, situated in a seignory
the lord of which once enjoyed the nominal rank of king. The effect of
Beranger's title to his song is of course humorous. The song-writer's
purpose was to draw, in the king whom he describes, a whimsical contrast
to the restless Napoleon. Thackeray furnishes us with a happily
sympathetic rendering of Beranger's "King of Yvetot," as follows; for
brevity's sake we omit one stanza:
There was a king of Yvetot,
Of whom renown hath little said,
Who let all thoughts of glory go,
And dawdled half his days a-bed;
And every night, as night came round,
By Jenny with a night-cap crowned,
Slept very sound.
Sing, ho, ho, ho! and he, he, he!
That's the kind of king for me.
And every day it came to pass
That four lusty meals made he,
And step by step, upon an ass,
Rode abroad his realms to see;
And wherever he did stir,
What think you was his escort, sir?
Why, an old cur.
Sing, ho, ho, ho! and he, he, he!
That's the kind of king for me.
If e'er he went into excess,
'Twas from a somewhat lively thirst,
But he who would his subjects bless,
Odd's fish!--must wet his whistle first,
And so from every cask they got,
Our king did to himself allot
At least a pot.
Sing, ho, ho, ho! and he, he, he!
That's the kind of king for me.
To all the ladies of the land
A courteous king, and kind, was he;
The reason why you'll understand,
They named him _Pater Patriae._
Each year he called his fighting-men,
And marched a league from home, and then,
Marched back again.
Sing, ho, ho, ho! and he, he, he!
That's the kind of king for me.
* * * * *
The portrait of this best of kings
Is extant still, upon a sign
That on a village tavern swings,
Famed in the country for good wine.
The people in their Sunday trim,
Filling their glasses to the brim,
Look up to him.
Singing, ha, ha, ha! and he, he, he!
That's the sort of king for me.
In his autobiography, an interesting book, Beranger says that hardly any
other writer equally with himself could have dispensed with the help of
the printer. His songs traveled of themselves from mouth to mouth
without the intervention of printed copies. In fact, Beranger was
already famous before his works went into print. It was this oral
currency of his songs that made them such engines of power. That
brilliant Bohemian wit among Frenchmen, Chamfort, defined, it is said,
before Beranger's time, the government of France to be absolute monarchy
tempered by songs. This celebrated saying does not overstate the degree,
though it may misstate the kind, of influence that Beranger exercised
with his lyre. He was, by conviction and in sympathy, a determined and
ardent republican, and yet, in fact, he founded, or played the chief
part in founding, the imperial usurpation of Louis Napoleon. This he did
by getting the glories of the great emperor sung by Frenchmen throughout
France, until the very name of Napoleon became an irresistible spell to
conjure by. We now give the most celebrated of these Bonaparte songs.
Mr. William Young, an American, has a volume of translations from
Beranger. Of this particular song, Mr. Young's version is so felicitous
that we unhesitatingly choose it for our readers. The title of the song
is, "The Recollections of the People." It was, we believe, founded on an
incident of Beranger's own observation; we shorten again by a stanza:
Aye, many a day the straw-thatched cot
Shall echo with his glory!
The humblest shed, these fifty years,
Shall know no other story.
There shall the idle villagers
To some old dame resort,
And beg her with those good old tales
To make their evenings short.
"What though they say he did us harm
Our love this cannot dim;
Come, Granny, talk of him to us;
Come, Granny, talk of him."
"Well, children--with a train of kings
Once he passed by this spot;
'Twas long ago; I had but just
Begun to boil the pot.
On foot he climbed the hill, whereon
I watched him on his way;
He wore a small three-cornered hat;
His overcoat was gray.
I was half frightened till he spoke;
'My dear,' says he, 'how do?'"
"O, Granny, Granny, did he speak?
What, Granny! speak to you?"
* * * * *
"But when at length our poor Champagne
By foes was overrun,
He seemed alone to hold his ground;
Nor dangers would he shun.
One night--as might be now--I heard
A knock--the door unbarred--
And saw--good God! 'twas he, himself,
With but a scanty guard.
'O what a war is this!' he cried,
Taking this very chair."
"What! Granny, Granny, there he sat?
What! Granny, he sat there?"
"'I'm hungry,' said he: quick I served
Thin wine and hard brown bread;
He dried his clothes, and by the fire
In sleep drooped down his head.
Waking, he saw my tears--'Cheer up,
Good dame!' says he, 'I go
'Neath Paris' walls to strike for France
One last avenging blow.'
He went; but on the cup he used
Such value did I set--
It has been treasured." "What! till now?
You have it, Granny, yet?"
"Here 'tis; but 'twas the hero's fate
To ruin to be led;
He, whom a pope had crowned, alas!
In a lone isle lies dead.
'Twas long denied: 'No, no,' said they,
'Soon shall he re-appear;
O'er ocean comes he, and the foe
Shall find his master here.'
Ah, what a bitter pang I felt,
When forced to own 'twas true!"
"Poor Granny! Heaven for this will look,
Will kindly look on you."
There was not in Beranger's genius much innate and irrepressible
buoyancy toward poetry, as we English-speakers conceive poetry. But he
practiced a severely self-tasking art of verse, which at last yielded a
product sufficiently consummate in form to command the admiration of
qualified critics. He became unquestionably first among the song-writers
of France; he even elevated song-writing, popular song-writing, to the
rank of acknowledged literature. His fashion, and, with his fashion, his
currency, are rapidly becoming things of the past; but the real merit of
his achievement, and, more than that, the fact of his extraordinary
influence make his name securely immortal in the literary history, and
in the literature, of France.
XXII.
LAMARTINE.
1791-1869.
Lamartine, the man, was an image incongruously molded of gold and of
clay. Take him at his best, and what is there better? Take him at his
worst, and you would not wish worse.
The same contrast holds, but not in the same degree, in Lamartine the
author. He is at once one of the most admirable, and one of the least
admirable, of writers.
There are few figures in history worthier to command the homage of
generous hearts than the figure of Lamartine in 1848, calming and
quelling the mob of Paris by the simple ascendant of genius and of
bravery. There are few figures in history more abject than the figure of
Lamartine, toward the close of his life, in the garb of a beggar
holding out his hat to mankind for the pence and half-pence of wonder,
of sympathy, and of sympathetic shame.
Perhaps we instinctively fall into some contagious conformity to
Lamartine's own exaggerating rhetoric in expressing ourselves as we do.
The chief facts of the life of Alphonse Marie Louis de Prat de Lamartine
are briefly these. Well-born, having for mother a woman of more than
Cornelian, of Christian, virtue, who herself mainly educated her son, he
traveled, loved, lost, wept "melodious tears"--mixed much in Parisian
society, until, at thirty, he published under the title "Meditations," a
volume of verse which made him instantly, brilliantly, triumphantly,
famous. Every thing desirable was easy to him now. He married an
Englishwoman of wealth, he wrote and published more poetry, amusing
himself meantime with various diplomatic service, was made member of the
French Academy, and in 1832 went traveling in the East, like an Eastern
prince for lavish splendor of equipage and outlay. His book, "Memories
of the Orient," published three years after, was the fruit of what he
saw and felt and dreamed during this luxurious experience of travel.
Dreamed, we say, for Lamartine drew freely on his imagination to expand
and embellish his memories of the East. Other volumes of verse, his
"Jocelyn," his "Fall of an Angel," and his "Recollections" followed
speedily.
The Revolution of 1830 had seated Louis Philippe on the throne.
Lamartine under him had been elected to the legislature of France and
had been making reputation as an orator. The poet and orator would now
be historian. Lamartine wrote his celebrated "History of the
Girondists," which, after first appearing in numbers, was issued in
volume in 1847. This book had in it the fermenting principle of a fresh
revolution. In 1848 that revolution came, and Louis Philippe fled from
Paris and from France, in precipitate abdication of his throne.
Now was the moment of glory and of opportunity for Lamartine. During
the three months following, he may be said to have ruled France.
Eloquence and bravery together never won triumphs more resplendent than
were Lamartine's during this swift interval of his dizzy elevation to
power. He was in title simply minister for foreign affairs, in a
provisional government which he had had himself the decision and the
intrepidity among the first to propose. But his personal popularity, his
serene courage, his magical eloquence, gave him much the authority of
dictator. It cannot be asserted that Lamartine, in this crisis, proved
himself a statesman able to cope with the stern exactions of the hour.
The candidate for such distinction success only can crown, and Lamartine
did not succeed. He fell, as suddenly and as swiftly as he had risen.
Yesterday omnipotent, he was absolutely impotent to-day.
But nothing can deprive Lamartine of the pacific glory his due from
several extraordinary feats of eloquence achieved by him, at imminent
risk to himself, on behalf of mankind. A mob of forty thousand Parisian
fanatics roared into the street before the Hotel de Ville to compel the
Provisional Government sitting there to adopt the red flag as the ensign
of the republic. This meant nothing less than a new reign of terror for
France. Lamartine, single-handed, met the wild beast to its teeth, and
with one stroke of the sword that went forth from his mouth laid it
tamed at his feet. "The red flag you bring us," cried the orator to the
mob, he shining the while resplendent in a personal beauty touched with
the gleam of genius and glorified with the consecration of courage--like
a descended Apollo, the rattling quiver borne on his shoulder--"The red
flag you bring us," said he, "has only gone round the Champ de Mars,
trailed in the blood of the people--in 1791 and in 1793; while the
tricolor has gone round the world, with the name, the glory, and the
liberty of our country." This eloquent condensation of history,
untremblingly shot, at close quarters, full in the face of those
wild-eyed insurgents, felled them, as if it had been a ball from a
cannon. But ranks from behind still pressed forward with menacing
cries. "Down with Lamartine!" "Down with the time-server!" "Off with his
head! His head! His head! Lamartine's head!"
The brandished weapons were in Lamartine's very face. But that gentle
blood never blenched. "My head, citizens? You want my head? Indeed, but
I wish you had it, every one of you. If Lamartine's head were now on
each pair of shoulders among you, you would be wiser than you are, and
the revolution would go on more prosperously." The mob was in
Lamartine's hand again, taken captive with a jest.
It is generally granted that Lamartine saved the nation from a new reign
of terror. But eloquence is not statesmanship; and Lamartine, weighed in
the balance, was found wanting. He served at last only to hand over the
state to Louis Napoleon, first president, and then emperor.
Under Napoleon, Lamartine, now and henceforward simply a private
citizen, found his affairs embarrassed. He had been a prodigal spender
of money. He toiled at letters to mend his broken fortunes. But his sun
was past its meridian, and it settled hopelessly in cloud toward its
west. He wrote a pseudo-biography of himself and published it as a
serial in one of the Paris daily newspapers. He almost literally with
his own hands performed the profaneness execrated by the poet, and "tare
his heart before the crowd"--or would have done so, if his production,
the "Confidences," so called, had really been what it purported to be,
the actual story of his life. It was in fact as much imagination as
revelation. But the once overwhelmingly popular author now cheapened
himself before the public in almost every practicable way. He brought
his own personal dignity to market in his works--and did this over and
over again. The public bought their former idol at his own cheapened
price, and he still remained poor. In 1850 a public subscription was
opened for his relief. As a last humiliation, the proud patrician
submitted to accept a pension from the empire of Louis Napoleon. This he
enjoyed but two years, for in two years after he died. A further space
of two years, and the empire itself that granted Lamartine his pension
had met its Sedan and ceased to be.
Fresh from admiring the radiant pages of Lamartine's rhetoric in prose,
from admiring the iridescent play in color, the deliquescent melody in
sound, of his verse, we feel it painful to admit to ourselves that so
much indisputably fine effect goes for little or nothing, now that the
fashion of that world of taste and feeling for which this writer wrote
has passed returnlessly away. But so it is. Lamartine, like
Chateaubriand, and for substantially the same reason, namely, lack of
fundamental genuineness, has already reached that last pathetic phase,
well-nigh worse than total eclipse, of literary fame, the condition of
an author important in the history of literature, rather than in
literature.
Poet, orator, historian, statesman, this munificently gifted nature was
most profoundly, most controllingly, poet. But he was French poet, which
is to say that his poetry is removed, if not quite from access to the
English mind, at least from access to the English mind through
translation. He, however, enjoyed at first high English reputation as
poet, and the publication of "Jocelyn," his masterpiece in verse, may be
said to have been even a European event in literary history.
The story of "Jocelyn" is avouched by the author to be almost a series
of actual occurrences. This assertion, to those familiar with
Lamartine's style in asserting, will not be quite so conclusive as on
its face it appears. At any rate, if "Jocelyn" be truth, Lamartine has
made truth read like fiction, and fiction of a highly improbable sort.
The story, true or fictitious--and which it is, as nobody now knows, so
nobody now cares--we need not detain our readers to report.
The poet staggered his public by printing on the title-page to his
"Jocelyn" the words, "An Episode," as much as to say that a certain
"Epic of Humanity," which he might finally (but which, as a matter of
fact, he never did) produce, would be large enough to make shrink into
the dimensions of a mere episode this poem of ten thousand lines more or
less!
Now for an extract or two. In the "Edinburgh Review," of a date not far
from fifty years past now, we find our translation. A day of festival,
followed by a long evening of out-door dancing to music, has just
closed. The breaking-up is described, with the sequel of young Jocelyn's
pensive and yearning emotions:
Then later, when the fife and hautboy's voice
Began to languish like a failing voice,
And moistened ringlets, by the dance unstrung,
Close to the cheek in drooping tresses clung,
And wearied groups along the darkening green
Gliding, in converse soft and low, were seen,
What sounds enchanting to the ear are muttered!
Adieus, regrets, the kiss, the word half uttered--
My soul was stirred; my ear with sweet sounds rife
Drank languidly the luscious draught of life;
I followed with my step, my heart, my eye,
Each maiden that with wearied eyes went by,
Thrilled at the rustle of each silken dress,
And felt that each that passed still left a joy the less.
At last the dance is hushed, the din at rest,
The moon is risen above the mountain's crest;
Only some lover, heedless of the hour,
Wends homeward, dreaming, to his distant bower;
Or, where the village paths divide, there stand
Some loitering couples, lingering hand in hand,
Who start to hear the clock's unwelcome knell,
Then dive and vanish in the forest dell.