Chapter VII: De Vigny's Poetry and Hugo's "orientales"

The first author to show the influence of Chénier was one of the most artistically audacious of the school, one of its original leaders--Alfred de Vigny--who as lyric poet was at times very faulty, at times an immaculate master. Chaste, lucid, pure, and austere, there is a quality in his best verse which has led all the critics who have attempted to describe it to employ such figures as the sheen of ivory, the whiteness of ermine, the sailing of the swan. It has the artistic severity, the sober colouring, the conciseness and the fastidiousness which also characterise Chénier's. And De Vigny was evidently afraid that these qualities would be attributed to Chénier's influence. For although no collection of his poetry was published before 1819, he took the trouble in later editions to furnish a number of the poems which seem to bear the clearest marks of this influence, with earlier dates, going even as far back as 1815. But even leaving out of consideration the fact that single poems of Chénier's had been given to the public (in Chateaubriand's _Génie du Christianisme_ and as a supplement to Millevoye's poetical works) still earlier than this, it is hardly possible to avoid the conclusion that, in spite of the absolute uprightness which as a rule distinguished him, Alfred de Vigny has antedated his poems to give himself an undeserved appearance of complete originality. For the single poems which he published before the first collection in question are far inferior to those contained in it which bear a much earlier date--so inferior that he excluded them from the complete edition of his works. André Chénier's influence upon De Vigny is thus indisputable. The latter assimilated many of the characteristics of the rediscovered master, though he emancipated himself from the old-fashioned Hellenism of style which hampered Chénier's flight. The poem _La Dryade_, to which he gives the additional title of "Idyll in the manner of Theocritus," is in reality an idyll in the manner of André Chénier. What distinguishes De Vigny most markedly from Chénier as a lyric poet is his cult of pure intellect and his proud, stoic feeling of solitude. He has painted his own ideal portrait in such poems as _Moïse, La colère de Samson_, and _La mort du loup_. He is very present in Moses' sad cry:

"O Seigneur, j'ai vécu puissant et solitaire,
Laissez-moi m'endormir du sommeil de la terre!"

I seem to hear the plaint of his strong, sorely wounded self-esteem in Samson's outburst of wrath over Delilah's treachery (his Delilah being the great actress, Marie Dorval). Thrice already has he forgiven her, but she has been more ashamed than surprised at finding herself discovered and forgiven:

"Car la bonté de l'Homme est forte et sa douceur
Écrase, en l'absolvant, l'être faible et menteur."

And I feel his stoicism, and at the same time read an apology for his unproductiveness, in those words in the poem on the wolf which dies without uttering a sound:

"À voir ce que l'on fut sur terre et ce que l'on laisse,
Seul le silence est grand, tout le reste est faiblesse."

Granted that there is a little affected rigidity in this attitude of his, still it is his pride, his spiritual nobility, his desire to perpetuate in his poetry the purity and austerity of his spirit, which impel him to assume it.

The poet who undertook the further development of Chénier's lyrical style was a man of different intellectual stamp from both him and De Vigny--a man intoxicated with self-confidence. Victor Hugo was three-and-twenty, "the bright dawn illumining his spring." In one of his poems ("À Mademoiselle J.," in _Chants du Crépuscule_) he has himself described the certainty of victory with which he made his début as a lyric poet:

"Alors je disais aux étoiles:
O mon astre, en vain tu te voiles.
Je sais que tu brilles là-haut!
Alors je disais à la rive:
Vous êtes la gloire, et j'arrive.
Chacun de mes jours est un flot!

Je disais au bois: forêt sombre,
J'ai comme toi des bruits sans nombre.
À l'aigle: contemple mon front!
Je disais aux coupes vidées:
Je suis plein d'ardentes idées
Dont les âmes s'enivreront!

Alors, du fond de vingt calices,
Rosée, amour, parfum, délices,
Se répandaient sur mon sommeil;
J'avais des fleurs plein mes corbeilles;
Et comme un vif essaim d'abeilles
Mes pensées volaient au soleil!

La terre me disait: Poète!
Le ciel me répétait: Prophète!
Marche! parle! enseigne! bénis!
Penche l'urne des chants sublimes!
Verse aux vallons noirs comme aux cimes,
Dans les aires et dans les nids!"

Victor Hugo took the verse which André Chénier had created, that pellucid medium of pure beauty, and when he had breathed upon it, it gleamed with all the colours of the rainbow. Strangely enough it was again from Greece that the inspiration came; but this time from modern Greece. Under the impression produced by the Greek War of Liberation Hugo set to work to write his _Orientales_. But what a different use of language! The words painted; the words shone, "gilded by a sunbeam" like the beautiful Jewess of the poems; they sang, as if to a secret accompaniment of Turkish music.

First had come Oehlenschläger's East. This was the East of the child, of the fairy-tale book, of the _Thousand and One Nights_--half Persia, half Copenhagen. It was dreams of genii in lamps and rings, of diamonds and sapphires by the bushel, the illimitable splendours of imagination all grouped round a few imperishable poetic types.

Then came Byron's East, a great decorative background for passion in its recklessness and melancholy.

The third in order was Goethe's, the East of the _West-östlicher Divan_, the refuge of the old man. He took the reposeful, the contemplative element of Oriental philosophy and wove German Lieder into it. Rückert, the great word-artist, followed in his steps.

But Hugo's East was different from all of these; it was the brightly variegated, outward, barbaric East, the land of light and colour. Sultans and muftis, dervishes and caliphs, hetmans, pirates, Klephts--delicious sounds in his ears, delightful pictures before his eyes. Time is a matter of indifference--far back antiquity, Middle Ages, or to-day; race is a matter of indifference--Hebrew, Moor, or Turk; place is a matter of indifference--Sodom and Gomorrah, Granada, Navarino; creed is a matter of indifference. "No one," he tells us in his preface, "has a right to ask the poet whether he believes in God or in gods, in Pluto, in Satan, or in nothing." His province is to paint. He is possessed by a genius which leaves him no peace until the East, as he feels it, is before him upon paper.

A careful study of the _Orientales_ shows us how they came into being. They were not written in the order in which they stand in the book. The first poem in order of production is No. 23, "La ville prise," written in 1824; next come poems written in 1826 and 1827 upon incidents in the War of Liberation, and not until 1828 is the poet's imagination thoroughly fired. The horizon widens; all the elements which tend, by reason of a close or distant connection of ideas, to crystallise round the Turkish war, group themselves round that nucleus.

If we examine the little poem, "La ville prise," which is an outcome of the powerful emotion produced in the poet by the martyrdom of Greece, we are struck by the identity of its standpoint with the standpoint of the French Romantic school of painting. In 1824 Eugène Delacroix exhibits his famous picture of the "Massacre of Scio," a bold and masterly delineation, glowing with flaming colour and intense feeling, of a horrible incident, destitute of the slightest element of conventional poetic justice. Very soon after this Hugo writes his little poem. It purports to be the intelligence brought by a humble slave. Standing with his hands crossed on his breast, he says:

"La flamme par ton ordre, ô Roi, luit et dévore.
De ton peuple en grondant elle étouffe les cris;
Et, rougissant les toits comme une sombre aurore,
Semble en son vol joyeux danser sur leurs débris.

Le meurtre aux mille bras comme un géant se lève;
Les palais embrasés se changent en tombeaux;
Pères, femmes, époux, tout tombe sous le glaive;
Autour de la cité s'appellent les corbeaux.

Les mères ont frémi! les vierges palpitantes,
O calife! ont pleuré leurs jeunes ans flétris;
Et les coursiers fougueux ont traîné hors des tentes
Leurs corps vivans, de coups et de baisers meurtris!

Les tout petits enfans, écrasés sous les dalles,
Ont vécu: de leur sang le fer s'abreuve encor...--
Ton peuple baise, ô Roi, la poudre des sandales
Qu'à ton pied glorieux attache un cercle d'or!"

This is the first chord which Hugo strikes in these poems; it rings sharp and shrill; but the poem is not quite good, because it is not quite true. It was not thus the slave spoke; we are sensible of the poet's own indignation in the narrative. The next poems, "Les têtes du Sérail," "Enthousiasme," and "Navarin," bear additional evidence to the modern Greek influence to which we originally owe _Les Orientales_. But then the poet makes a great artistic advance; he transports himself to the standpoint of the Turks, writes himself into their frame of mind.

"La douleur du Pacha" is the first, half-ironic attempt. Dervishes and bombardiers, odalisques and slaves, one after the other, each from his or her own point of view, try to imagine what can be the reason of the Pacha's sitting musing in his tent with his eyes full of tears. But none of the reasons that occur to them is the true one. It is not that his favourite concubine has been unfaithful, nor yet that there has been a head too few in the fellah's sack. No, he is grieving over the death of his favourite Nubian tiger.

But this is still only an attempt. The poet has not yet entirely got rid of himself, got outside of himself; we are conscious of him in one weak spot, which disturbs and dissolves the mental picture. But now comes the "Marche turque," and we are in the East.

Though the refrain of this masterly poem is a very barbarous one, its general tone is not savage; it is serious, full of a piety which is not the less heartfelt, and of ideas of honour which are not the less sincere because they are different from ours:

"Ma dague d'un sang noir à mon côté ruisselle,
Et ma hache est pendue à l'arçon de ma selle.

J'aime le vrai soldat, effroi de Bélial;
Son turban évasé rend son front plus sévère;
Il baise avec respect la barbe de son père,
Il voue à son vieux sabre un amour filial,
Et porte un doliman percé dans les mêlées
De plus de coups que n'a de taches étoilées
La peau du tigre impérial.

Ma dague d'un sang noir à mon côté ruisselle,
Et ma hache est pendue à l'arçon de ma selle.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Celui qui d'une femme aime les entretiens;
Celui qui ne sait pas dire dans une orgie
Quelle est d'un beau cheval la généalogie;
Qui cherche ailleurs qu'en soi force, amis et soutiens,
Sur de soyeux divans se couche avec mollesse,
Craint le soleil, sait lire, et par scrupule laisse
Tout le vin de Chypre aux chrétiens;

Ma dague d'un sang noir à mon côté ruisselle,
Et ma hache est pendue à l'arçon de ma selle.

Celui-là, c'est un lâche, et non pas un guerrier.
Ce n'est pas lui qu'on voit dans la bataille ardente
Pousser un fier cheval, à la housse pendante,
La sabre en main, debout sur le large étrier;
Il n'est bon qu'à presser des talons une mule,
En murmurant tout bas quelque vaine formule,
Comme un prêtre qui va prier!

Ma dague d'un sang noir à mon côté ruisselle,
Et ma hache est pendue à l'arçon de ma selle."

There is nothing Greek in this, nor yet any European satire of Turkish barbarity; the poet has become the dramatist within the Turkish intellectual and emotional pale; in this local colouring there is the genuine brutality which no northern poet has ever attained in handling such themes. This is true masculine savagery.

These are not sentimental, but robust major chords; and the major key predominates in all the poems, even where woman and love entwine their rhythms among the harsh, masculine ones. There are cruel, heartless women, like the Jewish sultana who demands the heads of her rivals; and there are refined, musical daughters of Eve, like the captive who longs for her own country and yet loves the sight of Smyrna's fairy palaces, and rejoices in breathing the soft air of the East in winter and in summer, by day and at night when the full moon shines upon the sea. There is the charming woman depicted in "Les adieux de l'hôtesse Arabe." The love which finds expression in this last-named poem is sad in its feeling of unrequitedness, repressed and chaste; it is a mixture of sisterly care, childlike superstition, and submissive worship, which reveals itself with plastic grace in a noble, proud character.

From the moment when the poet deserts the Greek camp for that of the enemy, his imagination allows itself free play. From pictures of Turkish cruelty it passes to the delineation of Turkish superstition. "Les Djinns" is a metrical marvel in which the approach of the wild hunt to the house, its thundering over the heads of the terror-stricken inmates, and its gradual dying away into the distance, are represented by the gradual rise from two-syllabic to ten-syllabic lines and gradual fall back to the two-syllabic. From the life of the Turkish seraglio it wings its flight to the tents of the Bedouins in the desert; from the desert as it is to-day to the desert as it was in the days when Buonaberdi overshadowed it with the wings of his eagles.

Enormous stretches of sand and water, the ordering and manœuvres of masses of troops, the architecture of towns, the sieges and storming of these towns, are seen with the poet's eye; and at a certain moment a natural association of ideas summons up the picture of great scenes of destruction read of in Bible history. In these last Hugo found his most gorgeous material. And it was also the material nearest akin to his own personality. His imagination was always at its best in dealing with the monstrous. The original Pegasus was, in the literal sense of the word, a superb monster, and that is just what Hugo's Pegasus is, in the figurative.

He writes "Le Feu du Ciel," the first poem in the book, the last in chronological order. We see the awful black cloud sailing across the sky. Whence has it come? Whither is it bound? No one knows. Hovering above the sea, it asks the Lord if it shall dry up the waters with its fires. No! answers the Lord, and onward it hurries, driven by His breath. Over the beautiful bays of the Mediterranean, over the fair corn lands of Egypt it passes, but the Lord still gives no signal to stop. Over the desert it flies, over the ruins of ancient Babel. It asks: Is it here? But still onward it must go. In the night time it reaches the magnificent sister cities--Sodom and Gomorrah--whose inhabitants have fallen asleep after their wild, voluptuous revels. Now the Lord gives the signal. The cloud opens, and from its flaming gorge pours a torrent of fire and sulphur and brimstone upon the doomed cities, until agate and porphyry and idols and marble colossi melt like wax, and the dazzling flames envelop and destroy everything living in the houses and the streets. Towards morning the ruin of old Babel is seen to lift its head above the mountain-ridge to see and enjoy the end of the play. It knows all about it; it also in its day has had experience of the love that chasteneth.

This is, as already remarked, not poetry in a minor key; some critics actually accused it of coldness; but if ever there was an unwarrantable accusation this was one. We feel as if the poet had actually seen it all, and had painted it with a brush like that pine which Heine would fain have torn from the Norwegian cliffs and dipped in the fire of Etna, to write with it the name of his beloved across the expanse of heaven. These _Orientales_ became the model for Romantic lyric poetry. In them the poet dared to lay hold of the painful, the ugly, the terrible (τὸ δεινόν as the Greeks said), and incorporate it in his verse, assured of his power to penetrate it all with poetry, to impart transparency to all these shadows and immerge all the blackness in a poetic sea of light. What he once wrote of the earth may be applied to his own lyric poetry. He describes the poor, stony, niggardly soil, which unwillingly yields man his daily bread; burning deserts here, polar ice there; cities from which mercy and hope have departed wringing their hands. He paints death, an eyeless spectre which generally seizes the best first; tells of seas where ships are wrecked in the night, and of continents where howling war swings its torches and races fall furiously one upon the other. And, he concludes, of all this is composed a star in the firmament of heaven.