_To Miss Girton, Cambridge_.
Dear Miss Girton,--Yes, I fancy Gerard de Nerval is one of that rather
select party of French writers whom Mrs. Girton will allow you to read.
But even if you read him, I do not think you will care very much for him.
He is a man's author, not a woman's; and yet one can hardly say why. It
is not that he offends "the delicacy of your sex," as Tom Jones calls it;
I think it is that his sentiment, whereof he is full, is not of the kind
you like. Let it be admitted that, when his characters make love, they
might do it "in a more human sort of way."
In this respect, and in some others, Gerard de Nerval resembles Edgar
Poe. Not that his heroes are always attached to a _belle morte_ in some
distant Aiden; not that they have been for long in the family sepulchre;
not that their attire is a vastly becoming shroud--no, Aurelie and
Sylvie, in _Les Filles de Feu_, are nice and natural girls; but their
lover is not in love with them "in a human sort of way." He is in love
with some vaporous ideal, of which they faintly remind him. He is, as it
were, the eternal passer-by; he is a wanderer from his birth; he sees the
old _chateau_, or the farmer's cottage, or even the bright theatre, or
the desert tent; he sees the daughters of men that they are fair and
dear, in moonlight, in sunlight, in the glare of the footlights, and he
looks, and longs, and sighs, and wanders on his fatal path. Nothing can
make him pause, and at last his urgent spirit leads him over the limit of
this earth, and far from the human shores; his delirious fancy haunts
graveyards, or the fabled harbours of happy stars, and he who rested
never, rests in the grave, forgetting his dreams or finding them true.
All this is too vague for you, I do not doubt, but for me the man and his
work have an attraction I cannot very well explain, like the personal
influence of one who is your friend, though other people cannot see what
you see in him.
Gerard de Nerval (that was only his pen-name) was a young man of the
young romantic school of 1830; one of the set of Hugo and Gautier. Their
gallant, school-boyish absurdities are too familiar to be dwelt upon.
They were much of Scott's mind when he was young, and translated Burger,
and "wished to heaven he had a skull and cross-bones." Two or three of
them died early, two or three subsided into ordinary literary gentlemen
(like M. Maquet, lately deceased), two, nay three, became poets--Victor
Hugo, Theophile Gautier, and Gerard de Nerval. It is not necessary to
have heard of Gerard; even that queer sham, the lady of culture, admits
without a blush that she knows not Gerard. Yet he is worth knowing.
What he will live by is his story of "Sylvie;" it is one of the little
masterpieces of the world. It has a Greek perfection. One reads it, and
however old one is, youth comes back, and April, and a thousand pleasant
sounds of birds in hedges, of wind in the boughs, of brooks trotting
merrily under the rustic bridges. And this fresh nature is peopled by
girls eternally young, natural, gay, or pensive, standing with eager feet
on the threshold of their life, innocent, expectant, with the old ballads
of old France on their lips. For the story is full of those artless,
lisping numbers of the popular French Muse, the ancient ballads that
Gerard collected and put in the mouth of Sylvie, the pretty peasant girl.
Do you know what it is to walk alone all day on the Border, and what good
company to you the burn is that runs beside the highway? Just so
companionable is the music of the ballads in that enchanted country of
Gerard's fancy, in the land of the Valois. All the while you read, you
have a sense of the briefness of the pleasure, you know that the hero
cannot rest here, that the girls and their loves, the cottage and its
shelter, are not for him. He is only passing by, happy yet wistful, far
untravelled horizons are alluring him, the great city is drawing him to
herself and will slay him one day in her den, as Scylla slew her victims.
Conceive Gerard living a wild life with wilder young men and women in a
great barrack of an old hotel that the painters amused themselves by
decorating. Conceive him coming home from the play, or rather from
watching the particular actress for whom he had a distant, fantastic
passion. He leaves the theatre and takes up a newspaper, where he reads
that tomorrow the Archers of Senlis are to meet the Archers of Loisy.
These were places in his native district, where he had been a boy. They
recalled many memories; he could not sleep that night; the old scenes
flashed before his half-dreaming eyes. This was one of the visions.
"In front of a _chateau_ of the time of Henri IV., a _chateau_ with
peaked lichen-covered roofs, with a facing of red brick varied by
stonework of a paler hue, lay a wide, green lawn set round with limes and
elms, and through the leaves fell the golden rays of the setting sun.
Young girls were dancing in a circle on the mossy grass, to the sound of
airs that their mothers had sung, airs with words so pure and natural
that one felt one's self indeed in that old Valois land, where for a
thousand years has beat the heart of France.
"I was the only boy in the circle whither I had led my little friend,
Sylvie, a child of a neighbouring hamlet; Sylvie, so full of life, so
fresh, with her dark eyes, her regular profile, her sunburnt face. I had
loved nobody, I had seen nobody but her, till the daughter of the
_chateau_, fair and tall, entered the circle of peasant girls. To obtain
the right to join the ring she had to chant a scrap of a ballad. We sat
round her, and in a fresh, clear voice she sang one of the old ballads of
romance, full of love and sadness . . . As she sang, the shadow of the
great trees grew deeper, and the broad light of the risen moon fell on
her alone, she standing without the listening circle. Her song was over,
and no one dared to break the silence. A light mist arose from the mossy
ground, trailing over the grass. We seemed to be in Paradise."
So the boy twisted a wreath for this new enchantress, the daughter of a
line of nobles with king's blood in her veins. And little brown,
deserted Sylvie cried.
All this Gerard remembered, and remembering, hurried down to the old
country place, and met Sylvie, now a woman grown, beautiful, unspoiled,
still remembering the primitive songs and fairy tales. They walked
together through the woods to the cottage of the aunt of Sylvie, an old
peasant woman of the richer class. She prepared dinner for them, and
sent De Nerval for the girl, who had gone to ransack the peasant
treasures in the garret.
Two portraits were hanging there--one that of a young man of the good old
times, smiling with red lips and brown eyes, a pastel in an oval frame.
Another medallion held the portrait of his wife, gay, _piquante_, in a
bodice with ribbons fluttering, and with a bird perched on her finger. It
was the old aunt in her youth, and further search discovered her ancient
festal-gown, of stiff brocade. Sylvie arrayed herself in this splendour;
patches were found in a box of tarnished gold, a fan, a necklace of
amber.
The holiday attire of the dead uncle, who had been a keeper in the royal
woods, was not far to seek, and Gerard and Sylvie appeared before the
aunt, as her old self, and her old lover. "My children!" she cried and
wept, and smiled through her tears at the cruel and charming apparition
of youth. Presently she dried her tears, and only remembered the pomp
and pride of her wedding. "We joined hands, and sang the _naive_
epithalamium of old France, amorous, and full of flowery turns, as the
Song of Songs; we were the bride and the bridegroom all one sweet morning
of summer."
I translated these fragments long ago in one of the first things I ever
tried to write. The passages are as touching and fresh, the originals I
mean, as when first I read them, and one hears the voice of Sylvie
singing:
"_A Dammartin, l'y a trois belles filles_,
_L'y en a z'une plus belle que le jour_!"
So Sylvie married a confectioner, and, like Marion in the "Ballad of
Forty Years," "Adrienne's dead" in a convent. That is all the story, all
the idyll. Gerard also wrote the idyll of his own delirium, and the
proofs of it (_Le Reve et la Vie_) were in his pocket when they found him
dead in La Rue de la Vieille Lanterne.
Some of his poems have a sweetness and careless grace, like the grace of
his favourite old ballads. One cannot translate things like this:
"_Ou sont nos amoureuses_?
_Elles sont au tombeau_!
_Elles sont plus heureuses_
_Dans un sejour plus beau_."
But I shall try the couplets on a Greek air:
"_Neither good morn nor good night_."
The sunset is not yet, the morn is gone;
Yet in our eyes the light hath paled and passed;
But twilight shall be lovely as the dawn,
And night shall bring forgetfulness at last!
Gerard's poems are few; the best are his vision of a lady with gold hair
and brown eyes, whom he had loved in an earlier existence, and his
humorous little piece on a boy's love for a fair cousin, and on their
winter walk together, and the welcome smell of roast turkey which greets
them on the stairs, when they come home. There are also poems of his
madness, called _Chimeres_, and very beautiful in form. You read and
admire, and don't understand a line, yet it seems that if we were a
little more or a little less mad we would understand:
"_Et j'ai deux fois vainqueur traverse l'Acheron_:
_Modulant tour a tour sur la lyre d'Orphee_
_Les soupirs de la sainte et les cris de la fee_."