André Chénier with Mathurin Régnier (in his book on French poetry in
the sixteenth century), he attributes the poem _La Liberté_ to 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.
VII
DE VIGNY'S POETRY AND HUGO'S "ORIENTALES"
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's _Génie du Christianisme_ and
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 poem _La 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 as _Moïse, La colère de Samson_, and
_La 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 douceur
Écrase, 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.," in _Chants 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 idées
Dont 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'abeilles
Mes 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 his _Orientales_. 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 the _Thousand 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 the _West-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 the _Orientales_ shows 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 tentes
Leurs 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 sandales
Qu'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 owe _Les 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 mêlées
De plus de coups que n'a de taches étoilées
La 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 orgie
Quelle 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 laisse
Tout 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 ardente
Pousser 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. These _Orientales_ became the model for Romantic lyric
poetry. In them the poet dared to lay hold of the painful, the ugly,
the terrible (τὸ 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.
VIII
HUGO AND DE MUSSET
Scarcely had Victor Hugo completed _Les Orientales_ before he set
to work upon a series of poems of a completely different character.
_Feuilles d'Automne_ conquered a new territory for French lyric poetry,
a domain in which the personal element was as conspicuously present as
it had been absent in _Les 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 the _Hernani_ battle 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.
In _Feuilles d'Automne_ the 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'Automne_ is the last collection of his poems in which he could
truthfully write of the happiness he found there. In 1833, during the
rehearsals of his _Lucrèce 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 the _Chants du Crépuscule_ which 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 cieux
Une 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'elle
Quelque 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'ombre
Où 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.