Count Alfred de Vigny, who was born in 1797, belonged to a family of ancient lineage, and was brought up a loyal adherent of monarchy by the grace of God. In 1814 he received a lieutenant's commission in the army of Louis XVIII, and he quickly developed into one of the most attractive and most independent literary characters of the day. In several branches of literature it was he who took the first step in the new direction, Hugo who followed. He wrote a historical novel in the style of Sir Walter Scott before Hugo did (Cinq-Mars, 1826), had a play acted before Hugo (the rhymed translation of Othello, 1829), the style of which created a great sensation, and he forestalled Hugo in introducing freedom and flexibility into lyric poetry. He was the Columbus of the new movement, Hugo the Amerigo Vespucci who gave the newly discovered continent its name.
It is not a matter for surprise that, at a time when authority was upheld on every side, Hugo should have begun by accommodating himself to existing literary rules, nay, by actually believing in them as real laws of poetry and language. But presently he commenced to experiment with them a little, to shake them a little, to doubt them a little, to interpret them in his own way, doing it all with the profoundest reverence, until it became no longer possible for him to observe them, upon which he overthrew them. In one of his poems (Les Contemplations, i., vii.) he gives a witty description of the revolution which he ended by making:
Je suis ce monstre énorme,
Je suis le démagogue horrible et débordé
Et le dévastateur du vieil ABCD;
Causons,
Quand je sortis du collège, du thème,
Des vers latins, farouche, espèce d'enfant blême
Et grave, au front penchant, aux membres appauvris;
Quand, tâchant de comprendre et de juger, j'ouvris
Les yeux sur la nature et sur Part, l'idiome
Peuple et noblesse, était l'image du royaume;
La poésie était la monarchie; un mot
Était un duc ou pair ou n'était qu'un grimaud;
Les syllabes, pas plus que Paris et que Londres,
Ne se mêlaient; ainsi marchent sans se confondre
Piétons et cavaliers traversant le pont Neuf;
La langue était l'État avant quatre-vingt-neuf;
Les mots, bien ou mal nés, vivaient parqués en castes;
Les uns, nobles, hantant les Phèdres, les Jocastes,
Les Méropes, ayant le décorum pour loi,
Et montant à Versaille aux carosses du roi;
Les autres, tas de gueux, drôles patibulaires,
Habitant les patois, quelques-uns aux galères
Dans l'argot; dévoués à tous les genres bas,
Déchirés en haillons dans les halles; sans bas,
Sans perruque; créés pour la prose et la farce.
* * * * * * * *
Alors, brigand, je vins; je m'écriai: Pourquoi
Ceux-ci toujours devant, ceux-lâ toujours derrière?
Et sur l'Académie, aïeule et douairière,
Cachant sous ses jupons les tropes effarés,
Et sur les bataillons d'alexandrins carrés
Je fis souffler un vent révolutionnaire.
Je mis un bonnet rouge au vieux dictionnaire.
Plus de mot sénateur! plus de mot roturier!
Je fis une tempête au fond de l'encrier,
Et je mêlai parmi les ombres débordées,
Au peuple noir des mots l'essaim blanc des idées;
Et je dis; Pas de mot où l'idée au vol pur
Ne puisse se poser, tout humide d'azur!
But Hugo, even when he doubts, has not yet reached this stage. He still styles his poetry "cavalier" poetry, stamping himself by a word which recalls the restoration of royalty in England as the poet of the restoration of royalty in France. The rock on which he splits is the impossibility of harmonising religious and literary tradition. This is especially felt in the ballads. Hugo revives memories of the Middle Ages and feudalism. What could be more royalist? But the literature of the age of Louis XIV. had utterly rejected the Middle Ages and their memories—so what could be less classical? One of the ballads (La ronde du sabbat) describes a witches' dance, another treats of sylphs and fairies; the motley superstitions of the old popular legends are revived—Romanticism is not far off. And the tone is anything but classic; in France, as in Germany and Denmark, the style of the popular ballad supplants the dignified, literary style. There is, moreover, in these poems a new patriotic element (Le géant, Le pas d'armes du roi Jean) which turns from classic antiquity to the France of the far-off past. Of this national movement, too, Chateaubriand had been the leader; his description of the ancient Gauls in Les Martyrs was the first attempt in the new direction; it made a powerful impression (according to his own confession) on such a man as Augustin Thierry, the future author of The Age of the Merovingians; we may safely say that it gave the impulse generally to a more graphic and animated historical style. But even this patriotic element was new and foreign to French poetry, was consequently a rebellion against tradition. The revival of old French subjects was accompanied by a revival of old French metres. Here also Chateaubriand led the way with that charming exile's song beginning with the beautiful lines:
Combien j'ai douce souvenance
Du joli lieu de ma naissance!
Ma sœur, qu'ils étaient beaux, ces jours
De France!
a song which was sung on the little rocky island in the Bay of St. Malo as he was laid to rest in the grave which he had hewn for himself there. And the tones of the days of Ronsard and the Pleiades are re-echoed simultaneously by Alfred de Vigny, the brothers Deschamps, Sainte-Beuve, and Hugo.
In May 1828 Alfred de Vigny published, in Madame de Soubise, lines like:
La voyez-vous croître,
La tour du vieux cloître?
Et le grand mur noir
Du royal manoir?
Entrons dans le Louvre.
Vous tremblez, je croi,
Au son du beffroi?
La fenêtre s'ouvre,
Saluez le roi.
In June he is followed and surpassed by Hugo in the admirable lines in Le pas d'armes du roi Jean:
Cette ville
Aux longs cris,
Qui profile
Son front gris.
Des toits frêles,
Cent tourelles,
Clochers grêles,
C'est Paris!