“I think we know one another well enough to speak frankly. You won’t show my letter to anyone. Well, for some time past I have been so filled—crushed, I might say—with feelings and ideas, that I think—but ‘think’ is too weak: I have an indelible impression—that I was born to be a poet, whether writer of verse or composer of music, never mind which. I feel it impossible to part from this belief; I have a kind of intuition that I am a poet. Granting that I still write badly, still this inward fire and this abundance of feeling make me hope that some day I shall write decently—please excuse the triviality of the phrase. Tell me, my dear friend, whether I can believe in my vocation. Perhaps you know better than I do myself, and you will not be misled.”
He writes again on August 18:
“So you answer that I am a poet, a true poet. Is it possible that you understand the full significance of your words? If you are right, my feelings do not deceive me, and the object and aspiration of my whole life is not a mere dream. Are you right, I wonder? I feel sure that I am not merely raving. No one knows me better than you do—of that I am sure. Yes! that high vocation is not mere raving, no mere illusion; it is too high for deception, it is real, I live by virtue of it and cannot imagine a different life for myself. If only I could compose, what a symphony would take wing from my brain just now! First a majestic adagio; but it has not power to express all; I need a presto, a wild stormy presto. Adagio and presto are the two extremes. A fig for your andante and allegro moderato! They are mere mediocrities who can only lisp, incapable alike of strong speech or strong feeling.”
To us this strain of youthful enthusiasm sounds strange, from long disuse; but these few lines of a youth under twenty show clearly enough that the writer is insured against commonplace vice and commonplace virtue, and that, though he may stumble into the mire, he will come out of it undefiled.
There is no want of self-confidence in the letter; but the believer has doubts and a passionate desire for confirmation and a word of sympathy, though that hardly needed to be spoken. It is the restlessness of creative activity, the uneasy looking about of a pregnant soul.
“As yet,” he writes in the same letter, “I can’t catch the sounds that my brain hears; a physical incapacity limits my fancy. But never mind! A poet I am, and poetry whispers to me truth which I could never have discovered by cold logic. Such is my theory of revelation.”
Thus ends the first part of our youth, and the second begins with prison. But before starting on that episode, I must record the ideas towards which we were tending when the prison-doors closed on us.
§11
The period that followed the suppression of the Polish revolt in 1830 was a period of rapid enlightenment. We soon perceived with inward horror that things were going badly in Europe and especially in France—France to which we looked for a political creed and a banner; and we began to distrust our own theories.
The simple liberalism of 1826, which by degrees took, in France, the form sung by Béranger and preached by men like La Fayette and Benjamin Constant, lost its magic power over us after the destruction of Poland.