When he began to write, his books gave dissatisfaction at the stupid court; though their whole tendency was royalist, they were regarded as seditious. He was accused of liberalism because he exalted Richelieu at the expense of Louis XIII. His father's early inculcations of devotion to the house of Bourbon proved of no avail; he now began to see what that devotion really was—"superstition, political superstition, a groundless, childish old belief in the fealty incumbent on men of noble birth, a kind of vassalage."[5]
Chivalry might, and did, induce him to preserve the outward appearance of a royalist; he would, for instance, have defended the monarchy during the Revolution of July if his services as an old officer had been required; but at heart he was no longer a monarchist—though this by no means implied that he was a democrat. "The world," he writes in his diary, "is vacillating between two absurdities, monarchy by the grace of God and the sovereignty of the people."
In the matter of religious faith he fell away even earlier. In spite of all the angels and archangels, principalities and powers of his youthful poems, he was suited for anything rather than a champion of the faith. By nature he was melancholy and sceptical, so melancholy "that no ray of hope or momentary happiness seems ever to have penetrated into his heart, so sceptical in regard to the creed which he confessed with his lips that he nourished a kind of personal animosity to the idea of God and of the immortality of the soul.
As early as 1824 we find him giving expression (in his diary) to his conception of life in the following parable: "I see a crowd of men, women, and children, all sound asleep. They awake in a prison. They become reconciled to their prison and make little gardens in its yard. By degrees they begin to notice that one after the other of them is taken away, never to return. They neither know why they are in prison nor where they are taken to afterwards, and they know that they will never know it. Nevertheless, some among them tell the others what becomes of them after their period of imprisonment—tell without knowing. Are they not mad? It is plain that the lord of the prison, the governor, could, if such had been his will, have let us know the charge on which we have been arrested and all the particulars of our case. Since he has not done it, and never will do it, let us be content to thank him for the more or less comfortable quarters he has given us...."
There is much contempt in this for the theologians, with their pretensions to knowledge, and much acrimony beneath the gratitude to "the lord of the prison." He adds in the same tone: "How good God is, what an adorable jailer, to sow so many flowers in our prison yard!... How explain this wonderful, consoling pity, which makes our punishment so mild? For no one has ever doubted that we are punished—we only do not know for what."
Six years later, employing the same parable, he writes: "I feel myself bowed down, O Lord, by the weight of a punishment which causes me constant suffering; but as I neither know my crime nor the accusation brought against me, I reconcile myself to my prison. I plait straw in order sometimes to forget it. For this is what human work amounts to. I am prepared for all possible evils, and I thank Thee, O Lord, for every day which has passed without any calamity!"
But two years after this he speaks out plainly: "The world revolts at the injustices entailed by its creation; dread of eternity prevents it from speaking openly; but its heart is full of hatred of the God who created evil and death. When a defier of the gods, like Ajax the son of Oileus, appears, the world approves him and loves him. Such another is Satan, such Orestes, such Don Juan. All who have combated the injustice of heaven have been admired and secretly loved by men."
De Vigny's diary shows that down to the very last days of the hereditary monarchy the connection between the literary, merely theoretical principle of authority and the practical, working principle was perfectly well understood. Germinating Romanticism was not less ardently opposed by the political opposition (who saw in the young school a support of ecclesiasticism) than by the men who from principle adhered to old tradition. De Vigny tells that he asked Benjamin Constant during the winter of 1819 what was the cause of the extreme disfavour shown by the Left to the poetry of the day. The answer was that the party wished to avoid the appearance of breaking every chain, and therefore retained the least irksome, the literary.
When the Revolution of July came, and put an end to the reign of the Bourbons, Vigny's attachment to the ideas of the restoration came to an end too. He writes: "I feel happy that I have left the army; after thirteen years of ill-rewarded service I may regard myself as quits with the Bourbons.... I have done for ever with burdensome political superstition."
Lamartine, too, at this time showed signs of an intellectual development of a suspicious nature. He continued to sing his pious hymns, but the orthodox Genevan pastor, Vinet, discovered that this piety was Christianity only in appearance, and that a most unorthodox pantheism lay concealed beneath the Christian phraseology.[6]