Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 by Various

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Thanks for the heavenly message brought by thee,
Child of the wandering sea,
Cast from her lap, forlorn!
From thy dead lips a clearer note is born
Than ever Triton blew from wreathed horn!
While on mine ear it rings,
Through the deep caves of thought I hear a voice that sings:--

Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,
As the swift seasons roll!
Leave thy low-vaulted past!
Let each new temple, nobler than the last,
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,
Till thou at length art free,
Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea!

* * * * *

BERANGER.

Beranger is certainly the most popular poet there has ever been in
France; there was convincing proof of it at the time of and after
his death. He had not printed anything since 1833, the epoch when he
published the last collection of his poems; when he died, then, on the
16th of July, 1857, he had been silent twenty-four years. He had, it
is true, appeared for a moment in the National Assembly, after the
Revolution of February, 1848; but it was only to withdraw again almost
immediately and to resign his seat. In spite of this long silence and
this retirement, in which he seemed a little forgotten, no sooner did
the news of his last illness spread and it was known that his life was
in danger, than the interest, or we should rather say the anxiety, of
the public was awakened. In the ranks of the people, in the most humble
classes of society, everybody began inquiring about him and asking day
by day for news; his house was besieged by visitors; and as the danger
increased, the crowd gathered, restless, as if listening for his
last sigh. The government, in charging itself with his obsequies and
declaring that his funeral should be celebrated at the cost of the
State, may have been taking a wise precaution to prevent all pretext for
disturbance; but it responded also to a public and popular sentiment. At
sight of the honors paid to this simple poet, with as much distinction
as if he had been a Marshal of France,--at sight of that extraordinary
military pomp, (and in France military pomp is the great sign of
respectability, and has its place whenever it is desired to bestow
special honor,) no one among the laboring population was surprised, and
it seemed to all that Beranger received only what was his due.

And since that time there has been in the French journals nothing but
a succession of hymns to the memory of Beranger, hymns scarcely
interrupted by now and then some cooler and soberer judgments. People
have vied with each other in making known his good deeds done in secret,
his gifts,--we will not call them alms,--for when he gave, he did not
wish that it should have the character of alms, but of a generous,
brotherly help. Numbers of his private letters have been printed; and
one of his disciples has published recollections of his conversations,
under the title of _Memoires de Beranger_. The same disciple, once a
simple artisan, a shoemaker, we believe, M. Savinien Lapointe, has
also composed _Le petit Evangile de la Jeunesse de Beranger_. M. de
Lamartine, in one of the numbers of his _Cours familier de Litterature_,
has devoted two hundred pages to an account of Beranger and a commentary
on him, and has recalled curious conversations which he had with him in
the most critical political circumstances of the Revolution of 1848. In
short, there has been a rivalry in developing and amplifying the
memory of the national songster, treating him as Socrates was once
treated,--bringing up all his apophthegms, reproducing the dialogues in
which he figured,--going even farther,--carrying him to the very borders
of legend, and evidently preparing to canonize in him one of the Saints
in the calendar of the future.

What is there solid in all this? How much is legitimate, and how much
excessive? Beranger himself seems to have wished to reduce things to
their right proportions, having left behind him ready for publication
two volumes: one being a collection of his last poems and songs; the
other an extended notice, detailing the decisive circumstances of his
poetic and political life, and entitled "My Biography."

The collection of his last songs, let us say it frankly, has not
answered expectation. In reading them, we feel that the poet has grown
old, that he is weary. He complains continually that he has no longer
any voice,--that the tree is dead,--that even the echo of the woods
answers only in prose,--that the source of song is dried up; and says,
prettily,--

"If Time still make the clock run on,
He makes it strike no longer."

And unhappily he is right. We find here and there pretty designs, short
felicitous passages, smiling bits of nature; but obscurity, stiffness of
expression, and the dragging in of Fancy by the hair continually mar the
reading and take away all its charm. Even the pieces most highly lauded
in advance, and which celebrate some of the most inspiring moments in
the life of Napoleon,--such as his Baptism, his Horoscope cast by a
Gypsy, and others,--have neither sparkle nor splendor. The prophet is
not intoxicated, and wants enthusiasm. On the theme of Napoleon, Victor
Hugo has done incomparably better; and as to the songs, properly so
called, of this last collection, there are at this moment in France
numerous song-writers (Pierre Dupont and Nadaud, for instance) who have
the ease, the spirit, and the brilliancy of youth, and who would be
able easily to triumph over this forced and difficult elevation of the
Remains of Beranger, if one chose to institute a comparison. We may well
say that youth is youth; to write verses, and especially songs, when one
is old, is to wish still to dance, still to mount a curvetting horse;
one gains no honor by the experiment. Anacreon, we know, succeeded; but
in French, with rhyme and refrain, (that double butterfly-chase,) it
seems to be more difficult.

But in prose, in the Autobiography, the entire Beranger, the Beranger of
the best period, the man of wit, freshness, and sense, is found again;
and it is pleasant to follow him in the story of his life, till now
imperfectly known. He was born at Paris, on the 19th of August, 1780;
and he glories in being a Parisian by birth, saying, that "Paris had not
to wait for the great Revolution of 1789 to be the city of liberty
and equality, the city where misfortune receives, perhaps, the most
sympathy." He came into the world in the house of a tailor, his good
old grandfather, in the Rue Montorgueil,--one of the noisiest of the
Parisian streets, famous for its _restaurants_ and the number of oysters
consumed in them. "Seeing me born," he says, "in one of the dirtiest and
noisiest streets, who would have thought that I should love the woods,
fields, flowers, and birds so much?" It is true that Beranger loved
them,--but he loved them always, as his poems show, like a Parisian and
child of the Rue Montorgueil. A pretty enclosure, as many flowers and
hedges as there are in the Closerie des Lilas, a little garden,
a courtyard surrounded by apple-trees, a path winding beside
wheat-fields,--these were enough for him. His Muse, we feel, has never
journeyed, never soared, never beheld its first horizon in the Alps, the
ocean, or the illimitable prairie. Lamartine, born in the country, amid
all the wealth of the old rural and patriarchal life, had a right to
oppose him, to put his own first instincts as poet in contrast with his,
and to say to him, "I was born among shepherds; but you, you were born
among citizens, among proletaries." Beranger loved the country as people
love it on a Sunday at Paris, in walks just without the suburbs. How
different from Burns, that other poet of the people, with whom he has
sometimes been compared! But, on the other hand, Beranger loved
the dweller in the city, the mechanic, the _ouvrier_, industrious,
intellectual, full of enthusiasm and also of imprudence, passionate,
with the heart of a soldier, and with free, adventurous ideas. He loved
him even in his faults, aided him in his poverty, consoled him with his
songs. Before all things he loved the street, and the street returned
his love.

His father was a careless, dissipated man, who had tried many
employments, and who strove to rise from the ranks of the people without
having the means. His mother was a pretty woman, a dress-maker, and
thorough _grisette_, whom his father married for her beauty, and who
left her husband six months after their marriage and never gave a
thought to her child. The little Beranger, born with difficulty and only
with the aid of instruments, put out to nurse in the neighborhood of
Auxerre, and forgotten for three years, was the object of no motherly
cares. He may be said never to have had a mother. His Muse always showed
traces of this privation of a mother's smile. The sentiment of home, of
family, is not merely absent from his poems,--it is sometimes shocked by
them.

Returning to his grandparents in Paris, and afterwards sent to a school
in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, where, on the 14th of July, 1789, he saw
the Bastille taken, he pursued his primary studies very irregularly. He
never learned Latin, a circumstance which always prejudiced him. Later
in life, he sometimes blushed at not knowing it, and yet mentioned the
fact so often as almost to make one believe he was proud of it. The
truth is, that this want of classical training must have been felt
more painfully by Beranger than it would have been by almost any other
person; for Beranger was a studied poet, full of combinations, of
allusion and artifice, even in his pleasantry,--a delicate poet,
moreover, of the school of Boileau and Horace.

The _pension_ in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, even, was too much for the
narrow means of his father. He was taken away and sent to Peronne, in
Picardy, to an aunt who kept an inn in one of the suburbs, at the sign
of the Royal Sword. It was while he was with this excellent person, who
had a mind superior to her condition, that he began to form himself
by the reading of good French authors. His intelligence was not less
aroused by the spectacle of the events which were passing under his
eyes. The Terror, the invasion by the armies of the Coalition, the roar
of cannon, which could be heard at this frontier town, inspired him
with a patriotism which was always predominant in him, and which at all
decisive crises revived so strongly as even to silence and eclipse for
the moment other cherished sentiments which were only less dear.

"This love of country," said he, emphatically, "was the great, I should
say the only, passion of my life." It was this love which was his best
inspiration as poet,--love of country, and with it of equality. Out of
devotion to these great objects of his worship, he will even consent
that the statue of Liberty be sometimes veiled, when there is a
necessity for it. That France should be great and glorious, that she
should not cease to be democratic, and to advance toward a democracy
more and more equitable and favorable to all,--such were the aspirations
and the programme of Beranger. He goes so far as to say that in his
childhood he had an aversion, almost a hatred, for Voltaire, on account
of the insult to patriotism in his famous poem of _La Pucelle_; and that
afterwards, even while acknowledging all his admirable qualities and the
services he rendered to the cause of humanity, he could acquire only a
very faint taste for his writing. This is a striking singularity,
if Beranger does not exaggerate it a little; it is almost an
ingratitude,--for Voltaire is one of his nearest and most direct
masters.

There is, indeed, a third passion which disputes with those for country
and equality the heart of Beranger, and which he shares fully with
Voltaire,--the hatred, namely, we will not say of Christianity, but
of religious hypocrisy, of Jesuitic Tartufery. What Voltaire did in
innumerable pamphlets, _facetioe_, and philosophic diatribes, Beranger
did in songs. He gave a refrain, and with it popular currency to the
anti-clerical attacks and mockeries of Voltaire; he set them to his
violin and made them sing with the horsehair of his bow. Beranger was in
this respect only the minstrel of Voltaire.

Bold songs against hypocrites, the Reverend Fathers and the Tartufes, so
much in favor under the Restoration, and some which carry the attack yet
higher, and which sparkle with the very spirit of buffoonery, like _Le
Batard du Pape_; beautiful patriotic songs, like _Le vieux Drapeau_;
and beautiful songs of humanity and equality, like _Le vieux
Vagabond_;--these are the three chief branches which unite and
intertwine to make the poetic crown of Beranger in his best days,
and they had their root in passions which with him were profound and
living,--hatred of superstition, love of country, love of humanity and
equality.

His aunt at Peronne was superstitious, and during thunder-storms had
recourse to all kinds of expedients, such as signs of the cross,
holy-water, and the like. One day the lightning struck near the house
and knocked down young Beranger, who was standing on the door-step. He
was insensible for some time, and they thought him killed. His first
words, on recovering consciousness, were, "Well, what good did your
holy-water do?"

At Peronne he finished his very irregular course of study at a kind of
primary school founded by a philanthropic citizen. During the Directory,
attempts were made all over France to get up free institutions for the
young, on plans more or less reasonable or absurd, by men who had fed
upon Rousseau's _Emile_ and invented variations upon his system. On
leaving school, Beranger was placed with a printer in the city, where
he became a journeyman printer and compositor, which has occasioned
his being often compared to Franklin,--a comparison of which he is
not unworthy, in his love for the progress of the human race, and the
piquant and ingenious turn he knew how to give to good sense. From this
first employment as printer Beranger acquired and retained great nicety
in language and grammar. He insisted on it, in his counsels to the
young, more than seems natural in a poet of the people. He even
exaggerated its importance somewhat, and might seem a purist.

Beranger's father reappeared suddenly during the Directory and reclaimed
his son, whom he carried to Paris. The father had formed connections in
Brittany with the royalists. He had become steward of the household
of the Countess of Bourmont, mother of the famous Bourmont who was
afterwards Marshal of France and Minister of War. Bourmont himself, then
young, was living in Paris, in order the better to conspire for the
restoration of the Bourbons. The elder Beranger was neck-deep in these
intrigues, and was even prosecuted after the discovery of one of the
numerous conspiracies of the day, but acquitted for want of proof. He
was the banker and money-broker of the party,--a wretched banker enough!
The narrative of the son enables us to see what a miserable business
the father was engaged in. This near view of political intriguers, of
royalists driven to all manner of expedients and standing at bay, of
adventurers who did not shrink from the use of any means, not even the
infernal-machine, did not dispose the young man already imbued with
republican sentiments to change them, and this initiation into the
secrets of the party was not likely to inspire him with much respect for
the future Restoration. He had too early seen men and things behind the
scenes. His father, in consequence of his swindling transactions, made a
bankruptcy, which reduced the son to poverty and filled him with grief
and shame.

He was now twenty years old; he had courage and hope, and he already
wrote verses on all sorts of subjects,--serious, religious, epic, and
tragic. One day, when he was in especial distress, he made up a little
packet of his best verses and sent them to Lucien Bonaparte, with a
letter, in which he set forth his unhappy situation. Lucien loved
literature, and piqued himself on being author and poet. He was pleased
with the attempts of the young man, and made him a present of the salary
of a thousand or twelve hundred francs to which he was entitled as
member of the Institute. It was Beranger's first step out of the poverty
in which he had been plunged for several years, and he was indebted for
the benefit to a Bonaparte, and to the most republican Bonaparte of the
family. He was always especially grateful for it to Lucien, and somewhat
to the Bonapartes in general.

Receiving a small appointment in the bureau of the University through
the intervention of the Academician Arnault, a friend of Lucien
Bonaparte, Beranger lived gayly during the last six years of the Empire.
He managed to escape the conscription, and never shouldered a musket. He
reserved himself to sing of military glory at a later day, but had no
desire to share in it as soldier. He was elected into a singing club
called _The Cellar_, all of whose members were songwriters and good
fellows, presided over by Desaugiers, the lord of misrule and of jolly
minstrels. Beranger, after his admission to the _Caveau_, at first
contended with Desaugiers in his own style, but already a ground of
seriousness and thought showed through his gayety. He wrote at this
time his celebrated song of the _Roi d'Yvetot_, in which, while he
caricatured the little play-king, the king in the cotton nightcap, he
seemed to be slyly satirizing the great conquering Emperor himself.

The Empire fell, and Beranger hesitated for some time to take part
against the Bourbons. It was not till after the battle of Waterloo and
the return of Louis XVIII. under convoy of the allied armies, that he
began to feel the passion of patriotism blaze up anew within him and
dictate stinging songs which soon became darts of steel. Meanwhile he
wrote pretty songs, in which a slight sentiment of melancholy mingled
with and heightened the intoxication of wine and pleasure. _La bonne
Vieille_ is his _chef-d'oeuvre_ in this style. He arranged the design of
these little pieces carefully, sketching his subjects beforehand, and
herein belongs to the French school, that old classic school which left
nothing to chance. He composed his couplets slowly, even those
which seem the most easy. Commonly the song came to him through the
refrain;--he caught the butterfly by the wings;--when he had seized the
refrain, he finished at intervals, and put in the nicer shadings at
leisure. He wrote hardly ten songs a year at the time of his greatest
fecundity. It has since been remarked that they smell of the lamp here
and there; but at first no one had eyes except for the rose, the vine,
and the laurel.

The Bourbons, brought back for the second time in 1815, committed all
manner of blunders: they insulted the remains of the old _grande armee_;
they shot Marshal Ney and many others; a horrible royalist reaction
ensanguined the South of France. The Jesuit party insinuated itself at
Court, and assumed to govern as in the high times of the confessors of
Louis XIV. It was hoped to conquer the spirit of the Revolution, and to
drive modern France back to the days before 1789; hence thousands of
hateful things impossible to be realized, and thousands of ridiculous
ones. Towards 1820 the liberal opposition organized itself in the
Chambers and in the press. The Muse of Beranger came to its assistance
under the mask of gay raillery. He was the angry bee that stung flying,
and whose stings are not harmless; nay, he would fain have made them
mortal to the enemy. He hated even Louis XVIII., a king who was esteemed
tolerably wise, and more intelligent than his party. "I stick my pins,"
said Beranger, "into the calves of Louis XVIII." One must have seen
the fat king in small-clothes, his legs as big as posts and round as
pin-cushions, to appreciate all the point of the epigram.

Beranger had been very intimate since 1815 with the Deputy Manuel, a man
of sense and courage, but very hostile to the Bourbons, and who, for
words spoken from the Tribune, was expelled from the Chamber of Deputies
and declared incapable of reelection. Though intimate with many
influential members of the opposition, such as Laffitte the banker, and
General Sebastiani, it was only with Manuel that Beranger perfectly
agreed. It is by his side, in the same tomb, that he now reposes in Pere
la Chaise, and after the death of Manuel he always slept on the mattress
upon which his friend had breathed his last. Manuel and Beranger
were ultra-inimical to the Restoration. They believed that it was
irreconcilable with the modern spirit of France, with the common sense
of the new form of society, and they accordingly did their best to goad
and irritate it, never giving it any quarter. At certain times, other
opposition deputies, such as General Foy, would have advised a more
prudent course, which would not have rendered the Bourbons impossible
by attacking them so fiercely as to push them to extremes. However
this might have been, poetry is always more at home in excess than in
moderation. Beranger was all the more a poet at this period, that he was
more impassioned. The Bourbons and the Jesuits, his two most violent
antipathies, served him well, and made him write his best and most
spirited songs. Hence his great success. The people, who never perceive
nice shades of opinion, but love and hate absolutely, at once adopted
Beranger as the singer of its loves and hatreds, the avenger of the old
army, of national glory and freedom, and the inaugurator or prophet of
the future. The spirit prisoned in these little couplets, these tiny
bodies, is of amazing force, and has, one might almost say, a devilish
audacity. In larger compositions, breath would doubtless have failed the
poet,--the greater space would have been an injury to him. Even in songs
he has a constrained air sometimes, but this constraint gave him more
force. He produces the impression of superiority to his class.

Beranger had given up his little post at the University before declaring
open war against the government. He was before long indicted, and in
1822 condemned to several months' imprisonment, for having scandalized
the throne and the altar. His popularity became at once boundless; he
was sensible of it, and enjoyed it. "They are going to indict your
songs," said some one to him. "So much the better!" he replied,--"that
will gilt-edge them." He thought so well of this _gilding_, that in
1828, during the ministry of M. Martignac, a very moderate man and of a
conciliatory semi-liberalism, he found means to get indicted again and
to undergo a new condemnation, by attacks which some even of his friends
then thought untimely. Once again Beranger was impassioned; he declared
his enemies incurable and incorrigible; and soon came the ordinances of
July, 1830, and the Revolution in their train, to prove him right.

In 1830, at the moment when the Revolution took place, the popularity
of Beranger was at its height. His opinion was much deferred to in the
course taken during and after "the three great days." The intimate
friend of most of the chiefs of the opposition who were now in power,
of great influence with the young, and trusted by the people, it was
essential that he should not oppose the plan of making the Duke of
Orleans King. Beranger, in his Biography, speaks modestly of his part
in these movements. In his conversations he attributed a great deal to
himself. He loved to describe himself in the midst of the people who
surrounded the Hotel of M. Laffitte, going and coming, listening to
each, consulted by all, and continually sent for by Laffitte, who was
confined to his armchair by a swollen foot. Seeing the hesitation
prolonged, he whispered in Laffitte's ear that it was time to decide,
for, if they did not take the Duke of Orleans for King pretty soon, the
Revolution was in danger of turning out an _emeute_. He gave this advice
simply as a patriot, for he was not of the Orleans party. When he came
out, his younger friends, the republicans, reproached him; but he
replied, "It is not a king I want, but only a plank to get over the
stream." He set the first example of disrespect for the plank he thought
so useful; indeed, the comparison itself is rather a contemptuous one.

He afterwards behaved, however, with great sense and wisdom. He declined
all offices and honors, considering his part as political songster at an
end. In 1833 he published a collection in which were remarked some songs
of a higher order, less partisan, and in which he foreshadowed a broader
and more peaceful democracy. After this he was silent, and as he was
continually visited and consulted, he resolved upon leaving Paris for
some years, in order to escape this annoyance. He went first to the
neighborhood of Tours, and then to Fontainebleau; but the free,
conversational life of Paris was too dear to him, and he returned to
live in seclusion, though always much visited by his troops of friends,
and much sought after. In leaving Paris during the first years of Louis
Philippe's reign, and _closing_, as he called it, _his consulting
office_, his chief aim was to escape the questions, solicitations, and
confidences of opposite parties, in all of which he continued to have
many friends who would gladly have brought him over to their way of
thinking. He did not wish to be any longer what he had been so
much,--a consulting politician; but he did not cease to be a practical
philosopher with a crowd of disciples, and a consulting democrat.
Chateaubriand, Lamennais, Lamartine,--the chiefs of parties at first
totally opposed to his own,--came to seek his friendship, and loved to
repose and refresh themselves in his conversation. He enjoyed, a
little mischievously, seeing one of them (Chateaubriand) lay aside his
royalism, another (Lamennais) abjure his Catholicism, and the third
(Lamartine) forget his former aristocracy, in visiting him. He looked
upon this, and justly, as a homage paid to the manners and spirit of the
age, of which he was the humble but inflexible representative.

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