Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 1.djvu/478

470 ''Évangile de la Jeunesse de Béranger. M. de Lamartine, in one of the numbers of his Cours familier de Littérature'', has devoted two hundred pages to an account of Béranger 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? Béranger 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,—

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 landed 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 Béranger, 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 Béranger, the Béranger 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 Béranger 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 Close-