Qui vole à plein cœur
Ne dort pas en l’air comme une hirondelle,
Et peut, d’un coup d’aile,
Briser une fleur.
—Alfred de Musset.
The literature of a nation is rooted in national characteristics. Foreign influences may dominate it for a time; but that which is born of the soil is imperishable, and must, by virtue of tenacity, conquer in the end. England, after the Restoration, tried very hard to be French, and the “happy and unreflecting wantonness” of her earlier song was chilled into sobriety by the measured cadences of Gallic verse; yet the painful and perverse effort to adjust herself to strange conditions left her more triumphantly English than before. We are tethered to our kind, and the wisest of all wise limitations is that which holds us well within the sphere of natural and harmonious development.
It is true, however, that nationality betrays itself less in lyrics, and, above all, less in love lyrics, than in any other form of literature. Love is a malady, the common symptoms of which are the same in all patients; and though love-songs—like battle-songs and drinking-songs—are seldom legitimate offsprings of experience, they are efforts to express in words that sweet and transient pain. “Les âmes bien nées”—without regard to birthplace—clearly of their passion, and seek their “petit coin de bonheur” under Southern and Northern skies. The Latin races have, indeed, depths of reserve underlying their apparent frankness, and the Saxons have a genius for self-revelation underlying their apparent reticence; but these traits count for little in the refined duplicity of the love-song.
Garde bien ta belle folie!
has been its burden ever since it was first chanted by minstrel lips.
M. Brunetière frankly admits the inferiority of the French lyric, an inferiority which he attributes to the predominance of social characteristics in the literature, as in the life of France. When poetry is compelled to fulfil a social function, to express social conditions and social truths, to emphasize fundamental principles and balance contrasted forces, the founts of lyrical inspiration are early dried. Individualism is their source,—the sharp, clear striking of the personal note; and the English, says M. Brunetière, excel in this regard. “To Lucasta. Going to the Warres,” has no perfect counterpart in the love-songs of other lands.