Now, every friend of Casimir Delavigne was absolutely and perfectly convinced that Casimir Delavigne was the first lyric poet of his time, the first dramatic poet of his century. People who never came in touch with him, and those who were stopped by the vigilant cordon which surrounded him, acted for and praised him, might well believe that these opinions emanated from himself, as from the centre to the circumference; but if they did get to close quarters with him, they were soon persuaded of the simplicity, the sincerity and the kindliness of that talented man.
I believe Casimir Delavigne never hated but one of his confrères. But him he hated well. That man was Victor Hugo. When the author of Odes et Ballades, of Marion Delorme and of Nôtre-Dame de Paris was taken with the strange fancy of becoming the colleague of M. Droz, of M. Briffaut and of M. Viennet, I took upon myself to go personally on his account to ask for Casimir Delavigne's vote. I thought that such an intelligent person as the author of the Messéniennes would regard it as the duty of one in his position to help as much as was in his power in providing a seat for his illustrious rival, a candidate who had done the Academy the honour of applying for a seat therein.
I was quite wrong: Casimir Delavigne obstinately declined to give his vote to Victor Hugo, and that with such vehemence and tenacity as I should have dreamt him incapable of feeling, especially towards me, of whom he was extremely fond. Neither entreaty nor supplication nor argument could, I will not say convince, but even persuade him to agree. And yet Casimir Delavigne knew well enough that he was rejecting one of the eminent men of his time. I never found out the reason for this antipathy. It was certainly not on account of their different schools: I was most decidedly not of the school of Casimir Delavigne, and he offered me the vote he withheld from Victor Hugo.
The poor Academicians were in a sorry fix in my case; for, if I had put myself up, I believe they would have elected me! They nominated Dupaty.
Hugo comforted himself by one of the wittiest sayings he ever made. "I believed," he said, "that one could enter the Academy par le pont des Arts; I was mistaken, for it appears it is by the Pont Neuf that entrance is effected."
And now that I have criticised the man, perhaps it may be thought that it will be a much more difficult matter still for me his confrère, his rival, at times his antagonist, to criticise his poetry. No! my readers are labouring under a misapprehension: nothing is difficult to whoso speaks the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Moreover, I have never written anything about a man that I was not ready to tell him to his face.
In order to judge Casimir Delavigne fairly, we must glance over the period at which he was born and in which he lived. We must speak of the imperial era. What occasioned the burst of hatred that made itself felt after the appearance of Henri III., of Marion Delorme and of the Maréchale d'Ancre, between the new and the old school of poetry and their representatives?
People have stated the fact without inquiring into its causes: I can tell you them.
Because, during all the years that Napoleon was levying his toll of 300,000 conscripts, he did not perceive that the poets he looked for, and looked for so vainly, had been compelled to change their calling, and that they were in camp, sword, musket or sabre in hand, instead of pen in hand in their studies. And this state of things lasted from 1796 to 1815—a period of nineteen years.
For nineteen years the enemy's cannon swept down the generation of men from fifteen to thirty-six years of age. So it came about that when the poets of the end of the eighteenth century and those of the beginning of the nineteenth confronted one another, they found themselves hemmed in on each side by an immense ravine which had been hollowed out by the grapeshot of five coalitions: at the bottom of this ravine a million of men were stretched, and among this million of men, snatched away before they had added to the population, were those twelve poets that Napoleon had so insistently demanded of M. de Fontanes, without being able to obtain them from him.