them laugh and sing and mingle their childish clamour with the chorus
of spirit voices whilst he writes and dreams at his desk. Their breath
will not disperse the gay bubbles of his dream. Do you think that I
fear, when these bright heads pass before my eyes in the midst of my
visions of blood and fire, that my verses will take flight like a
flock of birds startled by playing children? No, indeed! No image is
destroyed by them. The painted, chased flowers of the gay _Orientale_
expand more freely when they are near, the ballad grows more spirited,
the winged lines of the ode mount with more ardent aspiration towards
heaven."
A sad event which happened in 1843 carried the poet in riper years back
to these youthful days and that happy family circle. In February 1843
his eldest daughter married; in September she was accidentally drowned,
from a sailing-boat on the Seine. Her husband, Charles Vacquerie,
jumped into the water after her, and when his and all attempts to save
her proved fruitless, he drowned himself. The series of poems in _Les
Contemplations_ beginning with the verses, "Oh! je fus comme fou dans
le premier moment!" ought to be read along with _Feuilles d'Automne_.
In this series we come upon simple scenes exquisitely reproduced and
full of sincere feeling:
"Elle avait pris ce pli dans son âge enfantin
De venir dans ma chambre un peu chaque matin;
Je l'attendais ainsi qu'un rayon qu'on espère;
Elle entrait et disait: 'Bonjour, mon petit père;'
Prenait ma plume, ouvrait mes livres, s'asseyait
Sur mon lit, dérangeait mes papiers et riait,
Puis soudain s'en allait comme un oiseau qui passe.
Alors je reprenais, la tête un peu moins lasse,
Mon œuvre interrompue, et, tout en écrivant,
Parmi mes manuscrits je rencontrais souvent
Quelque arabesque folle et qu'elle avait tracée,
Et mainte page blanche entre ses mains froissée
Où, je ne sais comment, venaient mes plus doux vers.
Elle aimait Dieu, les fleurs, les astres, les prés verts,
Et c'était un esprit avant d'être une femme.
Son regard reflétait la clarté de son âme.
Elle me consultait sur tout à tous moments.
Oh! que de soirs d'hiver radieux et charmants
Passés à raisonner langue, histoire et grammaire,
Mes quatre enfants groupés sur mes genoux, leur mère
Tout près, quelques amis causant au coin du feu!
J'appelais cette vie être content de peu!"
Almost more beautiful is the following poem:--
"O souvenirs! printemps! aurore!
Doux rayon triste et réchauffant!
--Lorsqu'elle était petite encore,
Que sa sœur était tout enfant....--
Connaissez-vous sur la colline
Qui joint Montlignon à Saint-Leu
Une terrasse qui s'incline
Entre un bois sombre et le ciel bleu?
C'est là que nous vivions.--Pénètre,
Mon cœur, dans ce passé charmant!--
Je l'entendais sous ma fenêtre
Jouer le matin doucement.
Elle courait dans la rosée,
Sans bruit, de peur de m'éveiller;
Moi, je n'ouvrais pas ma croisée,
De peur de la faire envoler.
Ses frères riaient ... Aube pure!
Tout chantait sous ces frais berceaux,
Ma famille avec la nature,
Mes enfants avec les oiseaux!--
Je toussais, on devenait brave;
Elle montait à petits pas,
Et me disait d'un air très-grave:
'J'ai laissé les enfants en bas.'
Nous jouions toute la journée.
O jeux charmants! chers entretiens!
Le soir, comme elle était l'aînée,
Elle me disait: Père, viens!
'Nous allons t'apporter ta chaise,
Conte nous une histoire, dis!'--
Et je voyais rayonner d'aise
Tous ces regards de paradis.
Alors, prodiguant les carnages,
J'inventais un conte profond
Dont je trouvais les personnages
Parmi les ombres du plafond.
Toujours, ces quatre douces têtes
Riaient, comme à cet âge on rit,
De voir d'affreux géants très bêtes
Vaincus par des nains pleins d'esprit.
J'étais l'Arioste et l'Homère
D'un poëme éclos d'un seul jet;
Pendant que je parlais, leur mère
Les regardait rire, et songeait.
Leur aïeul, qui lisait dans l'ombre,
Sur eux parfois levait les yeux,
Et moi, par la fenêtre sombre
J'entrevoyais un coin des cieux!"
In the child's evening prayer, the famous "Prière pour tous," not only
for father and mother, but for the poor, the forsaken, the bad--the
idea of the family broadens into the idea of the whole great human
family. Humanity finds its expression in _Feuilles d'Automne_, as did
inhumanity in _Les Orientales_.
When the poet sits dreaming alone, he thinks first of those he loves;
he sees his friends one after the other; then his acquaintances,
intimate and slight; then all the multitude of those unknown to
him--the whole of humanity, living and dead; he gazes, until his vision
fails, upon the double ocean of time and space, the endless and the
bottomless, the endless that is eternally falling into the bottomless.
That sense of the infinite which Hugo's great forerunner, André
Chénier, despised, that religious feeling which was non-existent in the
child of the eighteenth century, reappears in Hugo, purified from the
superstition of the reactionary period.
From a height near the shore the poet hears two voices, one from the
sea and one from the land. Every wave has its murmur, every human being
his distinct utterance, his sigh, his shriek; and the wave voices and
the human voices form two great, pathetic choruses--the song of nature
and the cry of humanity.
The infinity of these poems is no longer the monstrous thing of which
we now and then catch a glimpse in _Les Orientales_; it is the ocean
in which it is natural and, to employ Leopardi's expression, sweet for
thought to suffer shipwreck.
In _Chants du Crépuscule_ Hugo quits the domain of private life. The
poems composing this volume are chiefly political. They constitute
a kind of diary of the events of the few years preceding their
publication. Hugo was a supporter of the constitutional monarchy; he
was even made a peer of France by Louis Philippe, and he accepted
the King's assistance when in 1845 it was proposed to eject him from
the Chamber of Peers because of a notorious love-affair (with Madame
Biard). He may be best described at this period as a royalist with a
tendency to opposition.
His poems celebrate the days of July and their martyrs, and express
indignation at the refusal of the Chamber of Deputies to allow the body
of Napoleon to be brought back to France, a project to which the royal
family offered no objection, and which was afterwards carried into
execution by the Prince de Joinville. The poem directed against Deutz,
who gave up the Duchess of Berry to Louis Philippe's government for
money ("A l'homme qui a livré une femme "), strikes indirectly not only
at Thiers, but at the King himself.
This is, however, an opposition based not upon political, but upon
social sympathies. The disappointment of the proletariat at the
insignificance of the result of the Revolution of July as far as they
were concerned, and the sullen hatred of the well-to-do which was
fermenting in the masses, find expression in such poems as "Sur le
bal de l'hôtel de ville," with its masterly picture of the women of
the people, who, gaudily decked out, beautiful and half-naked, like
the ladies who are driving to the ball, stand "with flowers in their
hair, dirt on their shoes, and hatred in their hearts," watching the
carriages arrive. Vague anxiety and restlessness, warnings to the
crowned heads of Europe to make for themselves friends betimes amongst
their people, show that the poet has his hand on the pulse of his age.
Nothing could be a better proof of the close relation between Victor
Hugo's writings and the spirit of the day than the circumstance that
Louis Philippe's government prohibited the performance of his dramas
quite as strictly as the Legitimist government had done. _Hernani_
had, indeed, been played in the preceding reign, Charles X. cleverly
replying to those who would have had him prohibit it, that, as far as
the theatre was concerned, his place was amongst the audience. But,
in spite of his personal partiality for Hugo, he had forbidden the
performance of _Marion Delorme_ because it was suggested to him that
its representation of Louis XIII.'s attitude towards Richelieu, would
be interpreted as satire of his own submissiveness to the clergy. This
prohibition had long since been repealed, but now the government of
Louis Philippe quite illegally forbade the representation of _Le Roi
s'amuse_. During the lawsuit which ensued, Hugo made the following
caustic remarks:
"Napoleon also was a despot, but his behaviour was very different.
He employed none of the precautionary measures by means of which our
liberties are now being juggled away, one after the other. He put out
his hand and took everything at once. The lion does not behave like
the fox. Things were done in the grand style then, gentlemen. Napoleon
said: 'On such and such a day I will make my entry into such and such
a capital,' and he made his entry on the day and at the very hour he
had named. A proclamation in the _Moniteur_ dethroned a dynasty. Kings
had to sit crowded together waiting in the anterooms. If a column was
desired, the Emperor of Austria was obliged to provide the bronze for
it. The affairs of the Théâtre Français were certainly regulated in a
somewhat arbitrary manner, but the regulations were dated from Moscow.
That was the day of great things, this is the day of small."
These words convey a good general idea of Hugo's poetico-political
attitude at the beginning of the Thirties.
Round about him his younger friends were working their way to fame.
Almost all the frequenters of his house in time revealed themselves
to be poets. Hugo would occasionally request Sainte-Beuve to recite,
and after much pressing the latter, begging little Léopoldine and
little Chariot to make plenty of noise the while, would repeat to the
assembled company one or two of his charming, mannered poems. Alfred de
Musset, a youth of seventeen, was brought to the house by Paul Foucher,
Hugo's brother-in-law. One morning De Musset went up to Sainte-Beuve's
garret, wakened him, and said with a shamefaced smile: "I too write
verses."
The verses he wrote have attained world-wide fame.
If, amongst French laymen, one were to ask a man of the people--say an
artisan, and amongst authors, either a Romanticist or a Parnassian:
Who is the greatest modern French poet? the answer would undoubtedly
be: Victor Hugo. But if the question were put to a member of the upper
middle class--a public official, a savant, a man of the world, or
amongst authors, to a member of the naturalistic school, or if one were
to appeal to the ladies, in all probability the answer would be: Alfred
de Musset. Whence this difference of opinion and what does it denote?
Alfred de Musset made his literary début in 1830, at the age of
nineteen, with _Contes d'Espagne et d'Italie_, a series of tales in
verse abounding in situations which it would be scarcely permissible
to describe. In the longer ones (_Don Paez, Portia_, &c.) treachery
runs riot; we have the wife who deceives her husband, the mistress who
deceives her lover, the countess who knows nothing about hers except
that he has killed her old husband; we have brutal pleasure, to obtain
which men hack and hew at each other, youthful sensuality which knows
neither ruth nor shame, senile depravity which employs love potions and
listens to the death-rattle with voluptuous pleasure; and, scattered
about amongst all this, songs, fiery sparks of passion, savagery, and
arrogance. Shakespeare's earliest works are not more wanton than these,
and these are, moreover, not naïvely, but refinedly wanton. There is
also a constant parade of unbelief, with odd interruptions in the shape
of unconscious confessions of weakness and spasmodic longings for the
comforts of religion.
Some were scandalised by the book, more praised it enthusiastically.
The young men of the literary circles were much struck by it. This was
Romanticism of an entirely new kind, much less doctrinaire than Victor
Hugo's. Here was a still more direct defiance of the classic rules
of metre and style; but this defiance was frolicsome and witty, not
martial like Hugo's. These attacks were enlivened by the presence of
an element entirely wanting in Hugo's books, and that an essentially
national element, what the French themselves call _esprit_. This
jesting, jeering Romanticism was refreshing after Hugo's pompous,
serious Romanticism. Here too the scenes were laid in Spain and Italy;
here too were medieval backgrounds, sword-thrusts, and serenades; but
it all gave twice as much pleasure with this addition of jollity,
of subtle satire, of doubt which scarcely believed what it said
itself. Take, for example, the notorious, offensively indecent ballad
of the moon, which aggravated the Classicists by its metre and the
Romanticists by its disrespectful attitude to its subject, their chief
favourite. It was a ballad which parodied its own style; its writer
seemed to be walking on his hands, kissing his toes to his readers.
Hugo's heroic bearing and giant's stride had compelled reverence;
his imposing rhetoric roused respectful admiration; but this
miraculous jaunty grace, this genius for shameless drollery, had both
an emancipatory and a fascinating effect. There was a diabolical
irresistibility about it, a quality which women as a rule are, and in
this case were, the first to appreciate. De Musset wrote of women,
always of women, and not, like Hugo, with precocious maturity, with
chivalrous tenderness, with romantic gallantry--no, with a passion, a
hatred, a bitterness, a fury, which showed that he despised and adored
them, that they could make him writhe and scream in agony, and that he
took his revenge in clamorous accusation and fiery scorn.
There is here no ripeness, wholesomeness, or moral beauty, but a
youthful, seething, incredible intensity of life, any description of
which would be no more successful than the description of scarlet given
to the blind man, which drew forth the remark: "Then it is like the
sound of a trumpet." And in this poetry there is, verily, a quality
which suggests scarlet and the flourish of trumpets. That beauty in
art is immortal is true; but there is something still more certainly
immortal, namely, life. These first poems of De Musset lived. They were
followed by his mature, beautiful works; and all men's eyes were opened
to his merits. In the poem "Après une lecture" he has himself described
his art:
"Celui qui ne sait pas, quand la brise étouffée
Soupire au fond des bois son tendre et long chagrin,
Sortir seul au hazard, chantant quelque refrain,
Plus fou qu'Ophélia de romarin coiffée,
Plus étourdi qu'un page amoureux d'une fée
Sur son chapeau cassé jouant du tambourin;
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Celui qui n'a pas l'âme à tout jamais aimante,
Qui n'a pas pour tout bien, pour unique bonheur,
De venir lentement poser son front rêveur
Sur un front jeune et frais, à la tresse odorante,
Et de sentir ainsi d'une tête charmante
La vie et la beauté descendre dans son cœur;
Celui qui ne sait pas, durant les nuits brûlantes
Qui font pâlir d'amour l'étoile de Vénus,
Se lever en sursaut, sans raison, les pieds nus,
Marcher, prier, pleurer des larmes ruisselantes,
Et devant l'infini joindre des mains tremblantes,
Le cœur plein de pitié pour les maux inconnus;
Que celui-là rature et barbouille à son aise;
Il peut, tant qu'il voudra, rimer à tour de bras,
Ravauder l'oripeau qu'on appelle antithèse,
Et s'en aller ainsi jusqu'au Père-Lachaise,
Traînant à ses talons tous les sots d'ici-bas;
Grand homme, si l'on veut; mais poëte, non pas."
In the allusion to those who trick themselves out with the tinsel
of antithesis we have a hit at Victor Hugo and his school, and the
almost unconscious expression of the genuine lyric poet's feeling of
superiority to the gifted rhetorician. The overpowering enthusiasm
for poetry and the poetic self-consciousness remind us of Goethe's
"Wanderers Sturmlied."
And as De Musset developed and approached the years of discretion, he
continued to reveal qualities which outshone Victor Hugo's. He won the
hearts of the reading public by his essential humanness. He confessed
his weakness and faults; Victor Hugo felt it incumbent on him to be
unerring. He was not the marvellous artificer of verse, could not,
like Hugo, hammer the metal of language into fashion and put word gems
into a setting of gold. He wrote carelessly, rhymed anyhow, even in
more slipshod fashion than Heine; but he was never the rhetorician,
always the human being. In his joy and his grief there seemed to be an
immortal truth. One of his poems flung upon a pile of poems by other
poets acted like aquafortis; everything else composing the pile burned
up or evaporated, as being mere paper and words; it alone remained, and
burned and rang in its piercing truth like a cry from a human breast.
How was it, then, that not he but Hugo became the leader of the young
Romantic School?
This question may be answered by reversing the position of the words in
the last line of the poem just quoted, and saying: "Poëte si l'on veut;
mais grand homme non pas."
In spite of the extraordinary variety of the standpoints adopted by
Hugo during the course of his long life, a certain unbroken line
of progression is plainly evident in his political and religious
development, and, what is almost of more importance, he acts with
unfailing dignity. Victor Hugo was a hard worker, Alfred de Musset
was exceedingly indolent; Hugo was an excellent economist, who made
the most of his great gifts, and did not squander his talents, but
carefully preserved both his physical and mental powers; De Musset
was reckless in the extreme, neglectful of his health, addicted to
narcotics even in his youth. Hugo had the faculty of making his
personality a centre, of collecting other men round him and binding
them to him, the faculty of the chief and leader; De Musset, the man
of the world, was an excellent companion, but De Musset, the artist,
was quite incapable of pulling in the traces with others. Hugo had the
unbounded belief in himself which made others believe in him.
De Musset begins with an affectation of superiority, with a display of
the extremist scepticism in religion and the extremest indifference in
politics. But beneath this scepticism and this indifference we soon
catch glimpses of an unmanly weakness, which in course of time reveals
itself plainly.
Read his masked self-revelation in _Confession d'un Enfant du Siècle_.
He tells how he was born at an unlucky moment. Everything was dead.
Napoleon's day was past, and, as if there could be no glory except the
glory of the Empire, we are told that the days of glory were at an end.
Faith was dead. There was no longer even such a thing as two little
pieces of black wood in the form of a cross before which one could
devoutly fold one's hands; and therefore, as if there could be neither
heart nor soul in those who are not attached to Catholic symbolism,
we are told that soul was dead. Some who comprehended that the day of
glory was past, proclaimed from the rostrum that liberty was a finer
thing even than glory, and at these words the hearts of the youthful
audience began to beat, as with a distant, terrible remembrance. "But
on their way home these youths met a procession carrying three baskets
to Clamart, and in the baskets they saw the corpses of three young men
who had been too loud in their praises of liberty;" and, as if callous
despair were the only mental attitude which the death of martyrs can
produce, we are told that their lips curled with a strange smile, and
that they forthwith plunged headlong into the maddest dissipation.
Such is the basis, the underlying idea, of a whole series of the
cleverest masculine characters drawn by De Musset, that remarkable
creation Lorenzaccio among the number. In his youth it produced Rolla,
the most famous of his typical characters.
In none of De Musset's works does the unstable, vacillating, feminine
quality in his philosophy display itself more markedly than in _Rolla_.
The introduction opens with the well-known wail of longing for the
Greece of old with its freshness and beauty, and for the Christendom of
old, with its pure aspiration and fervent faith, for the days when the
cathedrals of Cologne and Strasburg, of Notre-Dame and St. Peter, knelt
devoutly in their mantles of stone and the great organ of the nations
pealed forth the hosanna of the centuries.
Upon this follows the still more famous passage:
"O Christ! je ne suis pas de ceux que la prière
Dans tes temples muets amène à pas tremblants;
Je ne suis pas de ceux qui vont à ton Calvaire,
En se frappant le cœur, baiser tes pieds sanglants;
Et je reste debout sous tes sacrés portiques,
Quand ton peuple fidèle, autour des noirs arceaux,
Se courbe en murmurant sous le vent des cantiques,
Comme au souffle du nord un peuple de roseaux.
Je ne crois pas, ô Christ! à ta parole sainte:
Je suis venu trop tard dans un monde trop vieux.
D'un siècle sans espoir naît un siècle sans crainte.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Les clous du Golgotha te soutiennent à peine;
Sous ton divin tombeau le sol s'est dérobé:
Ta gloire est morte, ô Christ! et sur nos croix d'ébène
Ton cadavre céleste en poussière est tombée!
Eh bien! qu'il soit permis d'en baiser la poussière
Au moins crédule enfant de ce siècle sans foi,
Et de pleurer, ô Christ! sur cette froide terre
Qui vivait de ta mort, et qui mourra sans toi!'
Then comes the story.--Jacques Rolla is the most dissipated youth in
the dissipated city of Paris. He sneers at everything and every one.
"No son of Adam ever had a more supreme contempt for people and for
king." His means are small, but his love of luxury and voluptuousness
is great. Custom, which constitutes half the life of other men, is
utterly obnoxious to him. Therefore he divides the small fortune left
him by his father into three parts, three purses of money, each to last
a year. He spends them in the company of bad women upon all manner of
foolishness, making no secret of his intention to shoot himself at the
end of the third year.
And De Musset, aged 22, calls Rolla great, intrepid, honourable, and
proud. His love of liberty--and by liberty is understood freedom from
every kind of activity, from every calling, every duty--ennobles him in
the poet's eyes.
We have the description of the night of Rolla's suicide in the house of
ill-fame, of the preparations for the orgy, of the girl of sixteen who
is brought by her own mother; and then the poet begins his affecting
lament over the terrible depravity of society--the mother who sells
her child, the poverty which drives her to the trade of procuress, the
cheap chastity and hypocritical virtue of fortunately situated women.
And now comes the most famous passage of the poem, the apostrophe to
Voltaire:
"Dors-tu content, Voltaire, et ton hideux sourire
Voltige-t-il encore sur tes os décharnés?
Ton siècle était, dit-on, trop jeune pour te lire;
Le nôtre doit te plaire, et tes hommes sont nés.
Il est tombé sur nous, cet édifice immense
Que de tes larges mains tu sapais nuit et jour.
La Mort devait t'attendre avec impatience.
Pendant quatre-vingts ans que tu lui fis ta cour.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Vois-tu, vieil Arouet? cet homme plein de vie
Qui de baisers ardents couvre ce sein si beau,
Sera couché demain dans un étroit tombeau.
Jetterais-tu sur lui quelques regards d'envie?
Sois tranquille, il fa lu. Rien ne peut lui donner
Ni consolation, ni lueur d'espérance."
What had Voltaire to do with the death of this contemptible
spendthrift. Is the great worker to be held responsible for the suicide
of the idle voluptuary? Is this world of fantastic fools and women
without wills, the world of which Voltaire dreamed? Voltaire, who was
reason incarnate, whose hands, if they were black, were blackened only
with gunpowder, whose life was a determined struggle for light? Is all
this misery his fault? And if so, why?
Because he had no dogmatic faith.
The want of dogmatic faith is Rolla's excuse for living like an animal
and dying like a boy. See what has become in the course of a few years
of the bold defiance with which the poet began his career. The defiance
has turned into faint-hearted doubt, the atheism into hopeless despair.
How healthy, how determined and calm is Hugo's attitude compared with
this! Is it not easy now to understand how, in spite of everything, he
continued to hold the central place in French literature?
IX
DE MUSSET AND GEORGE SAND