Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli/Alfred de Vigny
‘Sept., 1839.
‘“La harpe tremble encore, et la flûte soupire.”
‘Sometimes we doubt this, and think the music has finally ceased, so sultry still lies the air around us, or only disturbed by the fife and drum of talent, calling to the parade-ground of social life. The ear grows dull.
‘“Faith asks her daily bread,
‘“And Fancy is no longer fed.”
‘So materialistic is the course of common life, that we ask daily new Messiahs from literature and art, to turn us from the Pharisaic observance of law, to the baptism of spirit. But stars arise upon our murky sky, and the flute soupire from the quarter where we least expect it.
‘La jeune France! I had not believed in this youthful pretender. I thought she had no pure blood in her veins, no aristocratic features in her face, no natural grace in her gait. I thought her an illegitimate child of the generous, but extravagant youth of Germany. I thought she had been left at the foundling hospital, as not worth a parent’s care, and that now, grown up, she was trying to prove at once her parentage and her charms by certificates which might be headed, Innocent Adultery, Celestial Crime, &c.
‘The slight acquaintance I had with Hugo, and company, did not dispel these impressions. And I thought Chateaubriand (far too French for my taste also,) belonged to l’ancien régime, and that Béranger and Courier stood apart. Nodier, Paul de Kock, Sue, Jules Janin, I did not know, except through the absurd reports of English reviewers; Le Maistre and Lamennais, as little.
‘But I have now got a peep at this galaxy. I begin to divine the meaning of St. Simonianism, Cousinism, and the movement which the same causes have produced in belles-lettres. I perceive that le jeune France is the ‘legitimate, though far younger sister of Germany; taught by her, but not born of her, but of a common mother. I see, at least begin to see, what she has learned from England, and what the bloody rain of the revolution has done to fertilize her soil, naturally too light.
‘Blessed be the early days when I sat at the feet of Rousseau, prophet sad and stately as any of Jewry! Every onward movement of the age, every downward step into the solemn depths of my own soul, recalls thy oracles, O Jean Jacques! But as these things only glimmer upon me at present, clouds of rose and amber, in the perspective of a long, dim woodland glade, which I must traverse if I would get a fair look at them from the hilltop, — as I cannot, to say sooth, get the works of these always working geniuses, but by slow degrees, in a country that has no need of them till her railroads and canals are finished, — I need not jot down my petty impressions of the movement writers. I wish to speak of one among them, aided, honored by them, but not of them. He is to la jeune France rather the herald of a tourney, or the master of ceremonies at a patriotic festival, than a warrior for her battles, or an advocate to win her cause.
‘The works of M. de Vigny having come in my way, I have read quite through this thick volume.
‘I read, a year since, in the London and Westminster, an admirable sketch of Armand Carrel. The writer speaks particularly of the use of which Carrel’s experience of practical life had been to him as an author; how it had tempered and sharpened the blade of his intellect to the Damascene perfection. It has been of like use to de Vigny, though not in equal degree.
‘De Vigny passed, — but for manly steadfastness, he would probably say wasted, — his best years in the army. He is now about forty; and we have in this book the flower of these best years. It is a night-blooming Cereus, for his days were passed in the duties of his profession. These duties, so tiresome and unprofitable in time of peace, were the ground in which the seed sprang up, which produced these many-leaved and calm night-flowers.
‘The first portion of this volume, Servitude et Grandeurs Militaires, contains an account of the way in which he received his false tendency. Cherished on the “wounded knees” of his aged father, he listened to tales of the great Frederic, whom the veteran had known personally. After an excellent sketch of the king, he says: “I expatiate here, almost in spite of myself, because this was the first great man whose portrait was thus drawn for me at home, — a portrait after nature, — and because my admiration of him was the first symptom of my useless love of arms, — the first cause of one of the most complete delusions of my life.” This admiration for the great king remained so lively in his mind, that even Bonaparte in his gestures seemed to him, in later days, a plagiarist.
‘At the military school, “the drum stiffed the voices of our masters, and the mysterious voices of books seemed to us cold and pedantic. Tropes and logarithms seemed to us only steps to mount to the star of the Legion of Honor, — the fairest star of heaven to us children.
‘“No meditation could keep long in chains heads made constantly giddy by the noise of cannon and bells for the Te Deum. When one of our former comrades returned to pay us a visit in uniform, and his arm in a scarf, we blushed at our books, and threw them at the heads of our teachers. Our teachers were always reading us bulletins from the grande armée, and our cries of Vive l'Empereur interrupted Tacitus and Plato. Our preceptors resembled heralds of arms, our study halls barracks, and our examinations reviews.” Thus was he led into the army; and, he says, “It was only very late, that I perceived that my services were one long mistake, and that I had imported into a life altogether active, a nature altogether contemplative.”
‘He entered the army at the time of Napeleon’s fall, and, like others, wasted life in waiting for war. For these young persons could not believe that peace and calm were possible to France; could not believe that she could lead any life but one of conquest.
‘As De Vigny was gradually undeceived, he says: “Loaded with an ennui which I did not dream of in a life I had so ardently desired, it became a necessity to me to detach myself by night from the vain and tiresome tumult of military days. From these nights, in which I enlarged in silence the knowledge I had acquired from our public and tumultuous studies, proceeded my poems and books. From these days, there remain to me these recollections, whose chief traits I here assemble around one idea. For, not reckoning for the glory of arms, either on the present or future, I sought it in the souvenirs of my comrades, My own little adventures will not serve, except as frame to those pictures of the military life, and of the manners of our armies, all whose traits are by no means known.”
‘And thus springs up, in the most natural manner, this little book on the army.
‘It has the truth, the delicacy, and the healthiness of a production native to the soil; the merit of love-letters, journals, lyric poems, &c., written without any formal intention of turning life into a book, but because the writer could not help it. What, more than anything else, engaged the attention of De Vigny, was the false position of two beings towards a factitious society: the soldier, now that standing armies are the mode, and the poet, now that Olympic games or pastimes are not the mode. He has treated the first best, because with profounder connoissance du fait. For De Vigny is not a poet; he has only an eye to perceive the existence of these birds of heaven. But in few ways, except their own broken harp-tone’s thrill, have their peculiar sorrows and difficulties been so well illustrated. The character of the soldier, with its virtues and faults, is portrayed with such delicacy, that to condense would ruin. The peculiar reserve, the habit of duty, the beauty of a character which cannot look forward, and need not look back, are given with distinguished finesse.
‘Of the three stories which adorn this part of the book, Le Cachet Rouge is the loveliest, La Canne au Jonc the noblest. Never was anything more sweetly naïve than parts of Le Cachet Rouge. La pauvre petite femme, she was just such a person as my ——. And then the farewell injunctions, — du pauvre petite maré, — the nobleness and the coarseness of the poor captain. It is as original as beautiful, c'est dire beaucoup. In La Canne au Jonc, Collingwood, who embodies the high feeling of duty, is taken too raw out of a book, — his letters to his daughters. But the effect on the character of le Capitaine Renaud, and the unfolding of his interior life, are done with the spiritual beauty of Manzoni.
‘Cinq-Mars is a romance in the style of Walter Scott. It is well brought out, figures in good relief, lights well distributed, sentiment high, but nowhere exaggerated, knowledge exact, and the good and bad of human nature painted with that impartiality which becomes a man, and a man of the world. All right, no failure anywhere; also, no wonderful success, no genius, no magic. It is one of those works which I should consider only excusable as the amusement of leisure hours; and, though few could write it, chiefly valuable to the writer.
‘Here he has arranged, as in a bouquet, what he knew, — and a great deal it is, — of the time of Louis XIII., as he has of the Regency in “la Marechale d'Ancre,” — a much finer work, indeed one of the best-arranged and finished modern dramas. The Leonora Galigai is better than anything I have seen in Victor Hugo, and as good as Schiller. Stello is a bolder attempt. It is the history of three poets, — Gilbert, André Chenier, Chatterton. Tle has also written a drama called Chatterton, inferior to the story here. The “marvellous boy” seems to have captivated his imagination marvellously. In thought, these productions are worthless; for taste, beauty of sentiment, and power of description, remarkable. His advocacy of the poets’ cause is about as effective and well-planned as Don Quixote’s tourney with the wind-mill. How would you provide for the poet bon homme De Vigny? — from a joint-stock company Poet's Fund, or how?
‘His translation of Othello, which I glanced at, is good for a Frenchman.
‘Among his poems, La Frégate, La Sérieuse, Madame de Soubise, and Dolorida, please me especially. The last has an elegiac sweetness and finish, which are rare. It also makes a perfect gem of a cabinet picture. Some have a fine strain of natural melody, and give you at once the key-note of the situation, as this: —
‘“J’aime le son du cor le soir, au fond des bois,
‘“Soit qu’il chante,” &c.
And
| ‘“Qu’il est doux, qu’il est doux d’ecouter les histoires |
| ‘“ Des histoires du temps passé |
| ‘“Quand les branches des arbres sont noires, |
| ‘“Quand la neige est essaisse, et charge un sol glacé, |
| ‘“Quand seul dans un ciel pâle un peuplier s’élance, |
| ‘“Quand sous le manteau blanc qui vient de le cacher |
| ‘“L’immobile corbeau sur l’arbre se balance |
| ‘“Comme la girouette au bout de long clocher.” |
‘These poems generally are only interesting as the leisure hours of an interesting man.
‘De Vigny writes in an excellent style; soft, fresh, deliberately graceful. Such a style is like fine manners; you think of the words select, appropriate, rather than distinguished, or beautiful. De Vigny is a perfect gentleman; and his refinement is rather that of the gentleman than that of the poets whom he is so full of. In character, he looks naturally at those things which interest the man of honor and the man of taste. But for literature, he would have known nothing about the poets. He should be the elegant and instructive companion of social, not the priest or the minstrel of solitary hours.
‘Neither has he logic or grasp with his reasoning powers, though of this, also, he is ambitious. Observation is his forte. To see, and to tell with grace, often with dignity and pathos, what he sees, is his proper vocation. Yet, where he fails, he has too much tact and modesty to be despised; and we cannot enough admire the absence of faults in a man whose ambition soared so much beyond his powers, and in an age and a country so full of false taste. He is never seduced into sentimentality, paradox, violent contrast, and, above all, never makes the mistake of confounding the horrible with the sublime. Above all, he never falls into the error, common to merely elegant minds, of painting leading minds “en gigantesque.” His Richelieu and his Bonaparte are treated with great calmness, and with dignified ease, almost as beautiful as majestic superiority.
‘In this volume is contained all that is on record of the inner life of a man of forty years. How many suns, how many rains and dews, to produce a few buds and flowers, some sweet, but not rich fruit! We cannot help demanding of the man of talent that he should be like “the orange tree, that busy plant.” But, as Landor says, “He who has any thoughts of any worth can, and probably will, afford to let the greater part lie fallow.”
‘I have not made a note upon De Vigny’s notions of abnegation, which he repeats as often as Dr. Channing the same watch-word of self-sacrifice. It is that my views are not yet matured, and I can have no judgment on the point.’