"Elle se sent, elle se connaît maintenant, la voix unanime du peuple.
_Elle vous réáuira tous au silence_, elle passera sur vos têtes comme
le souffle de Dieu; elle ira entourer votre représentation nationale,
et voici ce qu'elle lui dira: 'Jusqu'ici tu n'étais pas inviolable,
mais nous voici avec des armes _parées de fleurs_ et nous te déclarons
inviolable. Travaille, fonctionne, nous t'entourons de 400 mille
baïonnettes, d'un million de volontés. Aucun parti, aucune intrigue
arrivera jusqu'à toi. Recueille-toi et agis!'"
XXXIV
THE OVERLOOKED AND FORGOTTEN
If we take a survey of any literature some ten or twelve years after
the beginning of a great new movement in it, at the moment when the
army of the new era has proved successful in the conflict, we feel as
if we were inspecting a battlefield. Through the victors' shouts of
triumph we hear subdued sounds of lamentation. I do not mean the cries
of woe that proceed from the vanquished, retreating forces; these have
deserved their defeat, and their sufferings inspire no compassion in
me; the men I have in my mind are the wounded and the forgotten of the
victorious army. For literary warfare, too, has its lists of "killed
and missing." It is interesting to walk over the battlefield and cast
a glance at the writers of the generation of 1830 who were cut off in
their youth and strength, or were so severely wounded that, maimed and
dumb, they thenceforth only dragged out a disabled existence.
The conditions of the literary career are such that, out of hundreds
who enter for the race, only two or three reach the goal. The rest
are left lying exhausted along the course. The first to give in are
the unfortunates whose powers are undoubtedly inadequate, the men of
fragmentary talent who have been enticed by the hope of fortune and
fame, and who run on in an atmosphere of dazzling illusion until they
sink exhausted and fainting, to awake in the hospital. Next fall those
who, though really highly gifted, lack the peculiar combination of
qualities indispensable to success in the society in which they live,
those who have not the power of adapting themselves to circumstances,
much less of moulding society to suit their requirements, and who are
outrun by the more or less nimble mediocrities in whom the great public
recognises its own flesh and blood.
The very character of the work is fatal to many. It is work that knows
nothing of days of rest, that exhausts the nervous system, that cannot
be done leisurely, because only that which the author produces at white
heat has the power of affecting the reader with any of the emotion
felt by the writer. It is work which is, as a rule, very badly paid.
It is work which, being entirely intellectual, refines the senses of
the workman and heightens his susceptibilities to a degree incompatible
with his position and surroundings, yet which at the same time ties him
to, incorporates him with, these surroundings, in which he must observe
the same rules and conventions as his neighbours. Hence, in the case
of many, a thirst for life, for variety, for beauty, for experience,
which, remaining unslaked, preys upon the vitals, and is called by the
world decline, or consumption, or madness.
Others, again, succumb to the difficulties inseparable from the
author's position. The equilibrium of society depends at any given
moment upon a tacit agreement that the whole truth shall not be openly
proclaimed. Yet in every society there exist exceptional individuals
whose only task, whose mission, is to speak the whole truth. These are
its poets, its authors. Unless these speak the truth they degenerate
into mere sycophantic formalists. Hence the author is perpetually on
the horns of a dilemma. He must choose between ignoring what he ought
to proclaim--a proceeding which dulls his intellect and renders him
useless--and the dangerous step of speaking out plainly, which makes
him the object of such hostility as is only possible in literature.
It is a hostility which has at its disposal a thousand tongues if it
desires to speak, but also a thousand gags if it desires to impose
silence concerning an author and his works; and in the case of a man
whose very life depends upon publicity this is the greatest of all
dangers, that he may be quietly and treacherously slain with the
air-gun of silence.
All the fatigues, dangers, and difficulties of the author's life were
necessarily doubly great in such a period as that of 1830, when, as if
at the stroke of an enchanter's wand, a whole group of talented writers
appeared on the scene at the same moment; when every youth with any
gift of intellect or imagination felt himself drawn to the profession
of literature or art; when the renown to be won in these professions
seemed as glorious as did military fame in the days of Napoleon; when
it was more difficult than ever before to come to the front; and when,
moreover, enmity to all conventionality and to the quiet regularity of
middle-class life was supposed to be an essential condition of success
in art, and the ideal of the literary aspirant was to love and be
beloved with a consuming passion, to produce a masterpiece, to scorn or
save mankind, and die.
When we let our eyes wander over the battlefield where the unrenowned
fell, we see them lying in serried rows. There are men of richly
gifted, well-developed minds, like Eusèbe de Salles (born in Marseilles
in 1801), count, doctor, traveller in the East, professor of Arabic,
whose _Sakontala à Paris_ (1833) is one of the most talented and
original psychological novels of the day, but none of whose books
reached a second edition, much less brought him fame, and this though
he could remember a Sunday evening at Nodier's in his youth when he
and Hugo, on equal footing, were the heroes of the day.--There is
Régnier-Destourbet, whose novel, _Louise_, which is dedicated to Janin
and perhaps owes something to him, treats a painful subject with
discrimination and good taste.--There is Charles Dovalle, killed in
a duel at the age of twenty, whose collection of poems, _Le Sylphe_,
showed talent to which Victor Hugo paid a warm tribute after the
author's death.--There is the melancholy Eugène Hugo, Victor's elder
brother and faithful comrade and friend, who, equipped with a similar
though inferior lyric talent to Victor's, fought at his side in the
first Romantic campaign, but died insane in 1837.--There is a man of
as remarkable and noble gifts as Fontaney, another of Hugo's faithful
adherents. Fontaney was for a time secretary of legation at Madrid.
A proud, refined, reserved man, he has told in his novel, _Adieu_
(_Revue des deux Mondes_, 1832), the story of one of the romantically
sad adventures of his own life. In the life of George Sand there is
an allusion to the unfortunate love affair which was the cause of his
death in 1837.--There are men with a refined, delicate poetic talent,
like Félix Arvers, whose name now only recalls a single beautiful
sonnet, or Labenski, who is remembered by a single ode, or Ernest
Fouinet, who wrote the sonnet _A deux heureux_ on the margin of a
leaf of the edition of Ronsard which was presented at Sainte-Beuve's
suggestion to Victor Hugo by all the authors of the Romantic School,
each contributing something to its poetic equipment. Though Fouinet
himself is forgotten, one line of his at least:
"Pour que l'encens parfume il faut que l'encens brûle,"
should be safe from oblivion, for it conveys in a single metaphor, a
single phrase, the whole Romantic theory of poetry.--There are luckless
Saint-Simonist poets like Poyat; there are satirists like Théophile
Ferrière, who ridiculed the extravagances of the young Romanticists in
works in the style of Gautier's _Les Jeunes-France_, and whose _Lord
Chatterton_ is a farcical sequel to De Vigny's drama; and, lastly,
there are men like Ulric Guttinger, who is remembered only because of a
poem full of enthusiastic admiration addressed to him by the youthful
De Musset.
To give a somewhat more life-like impression of these stepchildren of
fortune, I shall dwell a little longer on the personality and career
of one or two of them, thereby also throwing additional light on the
character of the age; for the character of a period often sets its most
distinct stamp on the individuals whose peculiarity or extravagance
prevents their attaining lasting fame.
I take Ymbert Galloix first, not because he is greater than the rest,
but because he is a typical figure. The son of a Geneva schoolmaster,
Ymbert displayed remarkable gifts and received an excellent education.
He left his native town for Paris without money enough to keep him
even for a month, irresistibly attracted by the accounts of the
victories of Romanticism, determined to see the men whom he admired so
enthusiastically, and if possible to take his place among them as their
equal.
He soon found his way to the houses of Charles Nodier, the patriarch,
Hugo, the chief, and Sainte-Beuve, the standard-bearer of the new
school. Hugo has given a description of his first visit, which I shall
condense:
"It was on a cold October morning in 1827 that a tall young man entered
my room. He had on a white, comparatively new overcoat, and carried an
old hat in his hand. He talked to me of poetry. He had a roll of paper
under his arm. I noticed that he kept his feet carefully concealed
under his chair. He coughed a little. Next day it rained in torrents,
but the young man came back again. He stayed three hours, talking
eagerly about the English poets, of whose works he knew more than I
did; he specially admired the Lake School. He coughed a great deal, and
again I noticed that he always kept his feet under the chair. At last
I saw that his boots were in holes, and that his feet were soaking.
I could not venture to say anything about it. He left without having
spoken of anything but the English poets."
Galloix thus, as we see, went straight to the most famous authors of
the day. His words, his verses showed that there was something in him;
he was well received, he was even assisted, and his letters to Geneva
betray a naïvely vain satisfaction in being able to tell what men have
received him as their equal and what famous friends he has made. Yet
at the same time he was a prey to melancholy. His lot had been cast by
destiny in uncongenial surroundings. The great grief of his life was
the seemingly fantastic, and yet real one, that he had not been born an
Englishman. His mind dwelt on this till it became a kind of mania. He
felt that English literature, not French, was his natural element; he
read English from morning to night, and his one aim was to make enough
money to be able to live in London and become a writer in the English
language. When, a year after his arrival in Paris, he was found lying
dead on the bed in his miserable room, dead of despair and want, there
was an English grammar in his hand.
Listen to the tone of his letters. "Oh, my only friend I how unhappy
are they who are born unhappy I ... I had an attack of fever last
night.... Since I came here my unhappiness has taken five or six
different forms, but the root of all my misery is that I was not born
in England. Do not laugh at me, I beg of you; I am so unhappy. I am
on terms of friendship with the most famous authors, and have had
in their society, when my verses have met with approval, occasional
moments of superficial pleasure; but though I can be intoxicated with
these little triumphs of an evening, of a moment, my inner life is
not only pure wretchedness, it is a cancer. Molten lead flows in my
veins. If men could see into my soul they would pity me. England has
everything--fifty authors, at least, who have led a life of adventure
and whose books are full of imagination; in France there are not three.
There I should have had a country whose very prejudices I could have
loved, for there is so much poetry in the old English customs.... An
English lady who is giving me lessons says that in two years I shall be
able to write perfectly well in English."
It is a touching illusion. The poor youth who was not yet completely
master of his own language, whose odes were often broken-winded,
whose verses, artistically polished as they were, lacked life--dreamt
of being able in a couple of years to write a foreign language
brilliantly. He soon lost confidence in his powers and judged his own
poetry much more harshly than it was judged by others, and much more
harshly than it deserved. He withdrew into himself; would see no one,
and take no interest in what was going on in the outside world. He had
come from Geneva interested in everything and every one, and full of
enthusiastic self-confidence. In Paris he squandered his talent in talk
and argument (always a dangerous thing to do) until there was not a
virgin, not an untampered-with, idea left in his head. Then he became
a publisher's hack, and wrote notices of books and biographies until
he was completely nauseated. By the time he died, which he did at the
age of twenty-two, he had long been utterly indifferent to all general
interests and devoid of belief in his own ability. He simply allowed
himself to die.[1]
I pass on to men of more remarkable and sterling talent, and of them I
choose three--Louis Bertrand, Petrus Borel, and Théophile Dondey. These
are names which, while their owners were alive, were almost unknown,
but which are now familiar to many a lover of literature in France and
beyond its borders. In their lifetime the poor young authors, in the
course of a very few years, found it impossible to get their works
published; now (especially since the revival of interest in them due to
Charles Asselineau) they are published in _éditions de luxe_; and even
the frontispieces and title-pages of their first books are carefully
imitated, and the books themselves are marked in sale catalogues,
"valuable and rare."
Louis Bertrand, born in 1807 in that town of Dijon the praises of
which he has so charmingly sung, is better known by his pseudonym
of Gaspard de la Nuit. He represents more perfectly than any other
Romanticist one of the main aims of the Romantic endeavour--namely, the
renovation of prose style. Whilst his contemporaries were trying to
take the world by storm and passionate violence, he was developing in
his native town the sculptor's and the goldsmith's artistic qualities
in his treatment of language. No one had such an antipathy as he to
the conventional phrase, the trite expression. Before he wrote he, as
it were, passed the language through a sieve, which cleansed it of all
the dull, faded, worn-out words, leaving to be employed in the service
of his art only those possessed of picturesque and musical value. In a
poem there must always be some words which are really only there for
the sake of the rhyme or rhythm; the essence of Bertrand's art is that
every parasitic word, every scrap of padding, is rigidly excluded. His
work belongs to a branch of literature which he himself originated and
which others (Baudelaire, for example) cultivated afterwards; he wrote
short descriptions, never occupying more than a page or two, now in
Rembrandt's, now in Callot's, now in Velvet-Breughel's, now in Gerard
Dow's, now in Salvator Rosa's manner; the best of them are as perfect
as pictures by these masters.
In 1828, during the first, entirely unpolitical period of the Romantic
movement, Bertrand assisted in founding a literary organ of its ideas
in his native town. His contributions to _Le Provincial_ attracted
the attention of the famous Parisians, Chateaubriand, Nodier, and
Victor Hugo; and ere long the capital had such an attraction for the
young author that he was constantly finding his way there. He made his
début in its literary society one Sunday evening at Charles Nodier's,
where he was permitted to read a ballad aloud. In Nodier's house he
made acquaintance with the whole circle. He threw himself specially
on the protection of Sainte-Beuve, who became his mentor, showed him
hospitality during his short stays in Paris, and was entrusted with his
manuscripts. Bertrand had all the awkwardness of the provincial and
the extravagances of the dilettante; but to see the fire of the small,
shyly restless, black eyes was to divine the poet.
Immediately after the Revolution of July he threw himself ardently into
politics, attaching himself to the extreme Opposition party. The true
son of an old soldier of the Republic and the Empire, he gave vent
to the warlike instinct which had hitherto slumbered in his breast
in attacks upon the citizen rulers. He was only twenty-three, and a
newspaper of the opposite party had treated him with peculiar contempt
because of his youth. He compelled the editor of the paper to insert
a reply to the offensive article, in which he writes: "I prefer your
disdain to your praise. And your approbation would in any case be of
little consequence after that with which Victor Hugo, Sainte-Beuve,
Ferdinand Denis, and others have encouraged my literary talent. Your
insults oblige me to quote the encomiums with which genius itself has
deigned to honour me. Monsieur Victor Hugo writes to me: 'I read your
verses aloud to my friends as I read André Chénier's, Lamartine's, or
Alfred de Vigny's; it is impossible to be possessed in a higher degree
than you are of the secrets of form, &c., &c.' This is how Victor
Hugo writes to the man you call a clerk. It is true that I have not
the honour of being descended from any noble toad-eater, and that I
cannot present myself as a candidate at the elections (_i.e._ am not
on the list of the most heavily assessed citizens). My father was only
a captain of gendarmerie, only a patriot of 1789, a soldier of fortune
who at the age of eighteen hastened to the Rhine to shed his blood
there, and at the age of fifty could count thirty years of service,
nine campaigns, and six wounds. It is true that he left me nothing but
honour and his sword, which you, sir, would shrink from seeing drawn."
This is French journalistic style of 1832--not modest, certainly, but
also not spiritless. Bertrand was one of the company of young men
sympathetically alluded to by George Sand in _Horace_, who looked on
Godfrey Cavaignac as their political leader, and went by the name
of _les bousingots_ (sailor-hats). In Bertrand himself, republican
bluntness was curiously combined with the artistic ultra-refinement of
the Romanticist. He never won fame. He put too much ardour into his
first efforts, did not husband his strength. He overworked himself
to support his mother and sister, and died in poverty in 1841 in a
Paris hospital. David d'Angers, the great Romantic sculptor, who had
faithfully watched by the bedside of the dying man, sent to Bertrand's
home for a fine white sheet to wrap the body in, and was the solitary
mourner who followed him to his grave. (See David d'Angers' touching
letter on the subject of Bertrand's death in Charles Asselineau's
_Mélanges tirés d'une petite bibliothèque romantique_, p. 181, &c.
-Author's footnote.) He erected a monument to him; and Sainte-Beuve and
Victor Pavie published his _Gaspard de la Nuit_. In 1842 twenty copies
of this book were sold with difficulty, but in 1868 the Romanticist
bibliophile, Charles Asselineau, brought out an _édition de luxe_.
As an example of Bertrand's manner I give in the original the
sketch entitled _Madame de Montbazon_, with its motto, taken from
Saint-Simon's Memoirs:
Madame de Montbazon était une fort belle
créature qui mourut d'amour, cela pris à la
lettre, l'autre siècle, pour le chevalier de la
Rue qui ne l'aimait point.
--_Mémoires de Saint-Simon_.
La suivante rangea sur la table de laque un vase de fleurs et
les flambeaux de cire, dont les reflets moiraient de rouge
et de jaune les rideaux de soie bleue au chevet du lit de la
malade.
"Crois-tu, Mariette, qu'il viendra?--Oh! dormez, dormez un
peu, madame!--Oui, je dormirai bientôt, pour rêver à lui toute
l'éternité!"
"On entendit quelqu'un monter l'escalier: "Ah! si c'était lui!"
murmura la mourante, en souriant, le papillon du tombeau déjà
sur les lèvres.
C'était un petit page qui apportait de la part de la reine,
à madame la duchesse, des confitures, des biscuits et des
elixirs, sur un plateau d'argent.
"Ah! il ne vient pas," dit-elle d'une voix défaillante; "il ne
viendra pas! Mariette, donne-moi une de ces fleurs, que je la
respire et la baise pour l'amour de lui!"
Alors Madame de Montbazon, fermant les yeux, demeura immobile.
Elle était morte d'amour, rendant son âme dans le parfum d'une
jacinthe.
It often seems as if the place of those who disappear too early from
the field of literature were, a little sooner or a little later,
filled by others. But, strictly speaking, no individual ever exactly
fills another's place. The pen which fell from Louis Bertrand's hand
was, undoubtedly, seized by Théophile Gautier; and Gautier's far
more comprehensive talent caused Bertrand's to be forgotten; but no
connoisseur can fail to see that in Bertrand's writing there is an
exquisite, a marvellously touching quality, to the possession of which
Gautier with his colder plastic gift never attained.
Frequent mention has already been made of Petrus Borel, whose simple
home was long the headquarters of Victor Hugo's young friends. Borel
was both artist and author; he painted in Dévéria's studio and wrote
defiant poems under the _nom de plume_ of "Le Lycanthrope." He inspired
the others with great respect. In appearance he resembled a Spaniard
or Arab of the fifteenth century; and when his comrades returned from
the theatre after seeing Firmin (an actor accustomed to the rôles in
Delavigne's and Scribe's plays) play Hernani, they always lamented that
the part of that ideal bandit could not be given to Petrus. He would
have swooped down on the stage like a falcon; and how magnificent he
would have looked in the red head-covering and the leather jerkin with
the green sleeves. Naturally he would, for he and such as he were the
spiritual prototypes of Hernani.
_Rapsodies_, Borel's volume of poems, is a very youthful and immature
work; it contains some really fine poetry mixed up with childish
protests and imprecations. One thing it proves, that no prouder heart
than its author's beat in the whole Romantic group. His verses breathe
the despair engendered by poverty, the loneliness, the ardent love of
liberty and consuming thirst for justice, which fill the poet's heart.
Read such a verse as the following, taken from the poem "Désespoir":
"Comme une louve ayant fait chasse vaine,
Grinçant les dents, s'en va par le chemin;
Je vais, hagard, tout chargé de ma peine,
Seul avec moi, nulle main dans ma main;
Pas une voix qui me dise: À demain."
and you have the reality of the emotional life which Dumas put on
the stage in _Antony_. Even the get-up of the book is significant.
The frontispiece represents Borel himself sitting at his table with
bared neck and arms, a Phrygian cap on his head, and in his hands
a broad-bladed dagger, at which he is gazing, deep in thought. The
preface gives us a vivid impression of the tone prevailing in the
republican group of young Romanticists in 1832. In it Borel writes:
"I answer the question before it is asked, and say frankly: Yes, I am
a Republican! Ask the Duke of Orleans (the King) if he remembers the
voice that pursued him on the 9th of August, when he was on his way to
take the oath to the ex-Chamber, shouting into his face: Liberté et
Republique! while the deceived populace was cheering loudly?... But if
I speak of Republic it is only because this word represents to me the
greatest possible degree of independence which society and civilisation
permit. I am a Republican because I cannot be a Caribbean. I require
an immense amount of liberty ... and a man with a lot like mine, a
man irritated by numberless evils, would deserve only approbation if
he dreamed of absolute equality, if he demanded an agrarian law....
To those who say that there is something offensively vulgar about the
book I reply that its author is certainly not the King's bedmaker. Is
he not, nevertheless, on the level of an age in which the country is
governed by stupid bankers and by a monarch whose motto is: 'Dieu soit
loué et mes boutiques aussi?'"