_From the article by Robert Louis Stevenson in the Encyclopaedia
Britannica._
....He worked deliberately, never wrote more than fifteen songs a year and
often less, and was so fastidious that he has not preserved a quarter of
what he finished. "I am a good little bit of a poet," he says himself,
"clever in the craft, and a conscientious worker, to whom old airs and a
modest choice of subjects (_le coin ou je me suis confine_), have brought
some success." Nevertheless, he makes a figure of importance in literary
history. When he first began to cultivate the _chanson_, this minor form
lay under some contempt, and was restricted to slight subjects and a
humorous guise of treatment. Gradually he filled these little chiseled
toys of verbal perfection with ever more and more sentiment. From a date
comparatively early he had determined to sing for the people. It was for
this reason that he fled, as far as possible, the houses of his
influential friends, and came back gladly to the garret and the street
corner. Thus it was, also, that he came to acknowledge obligations to
Emile Debraux, who had often stood between him and the masses as
interpreter, and given him the key-note of the popular humour. Now, he had
observed in the songs of sailors, and all who labour, a prevailing tone of
sadness; and so, as he grew more masterful in this sort of expression, he
sought more and more after what is deep, serious, and constant in the
thoughts of common men. The evolution was slow; and we can see in his own
works examples of every stage, from that of witty indifference in fifty
pieces of the first collection, to that of grave and even tragic feeling
in _Les Souvenirs du Peuple_ or _Le Vieux Vagabond_. And this innovation
involved another, which was as a sort of prelude to the great romantic
movement. For the _chanson_, as he says himself, opened up to him a path
in which his genius could develop itself at ease; he escaped, by this
literary postern, from strict academical requirements, and had at his
disposal the whole dictionary, four-fifths of which, according to La
Harpe, were forbidden to the use of more regular and pretentious poetry.
If he still kept some of the old vocabulary, some of the old imagery, he
was yet accustoming people to hear moving subjects treated in a manner
more free and simple than heretofore; so that his was a sort of
conservative reform, preceding the violent revolution of Victor Hugo and
his army of uncompromising romantics. He seems himself to have had
glimmerings of some such idea; but he withheld his full approval from the
new movement on two grounds:--first, because the romantic school misused
somewhat brutally the delicate organism of the French language; and
second, as he wrote to Sainte-Beuve in 1832, because they adopted the
motto of "Art for art," and set no object of public usefulness before them
as they wrote. For himself (and this is the third point of importance) he
had a strong sense of political responsibility. Public interest took a far
higher place in his estimation than any private passion or favour. He had
little toleration for those erotic poets who sing their own loves and not
the common sorrows of mankind, "who forget," to quote his own words,
"forget beside their mistress those who labour before the Lord."...