In 1846 Théophile Gautier, with the assistance of that influential lady, Madame de Girardin, brought about a temporary improvement in Borel's circumstances. They procured him the post of Colonial Inspector in the interior of Algiers, near Mostaganem. Though it was a wretched little appointment, it exactly suited a man like Borel, with his were-wolfish shrinking from contact with human beings; but he was soon dismissed from it, his strong sense of justice having led him, unfortunately for himself, to accuse a superior official of defrauding the government. He never saw France again; he died in Africa, of sunstroke, some say; according to others, of starvation.
Mérimée, as we have already observed, took up Borel's special department of literature, and in his admirable short stories treated revolting subjects with a surer hand. But in Mérimée's writing the irony of the man of the world and the elegance of the courtier stifled the passion which was Petrus Borel's strong point. In Mérimée's works we find some of the challenges which Borel flung in the face of society paraphrased in language which made them fit to lie on a drawing-room table. There was no inheritor of the fire which burned in the inmost sanctuary of Petrus Borel's soul.[2]
The last of these early paralysed authors whom I shall name is Théophile Dondey, better known as Philothée O'Neddy.
O'Neddy, born in 1811, made his literary début in 1833 with a volume of poems entitled Feu et Flamme, which the public, revelling at the moment in a superabundance of excellent poetry, would have nothing to say to. The author, who was extremely poor, and was obliged, for the sake of supporting his mother, to attend to the duties of a small Civil Service appointment, lost courage, and never published another poem. Of his book, which he had brought out at his own expense, hardly a copy was sold. He withdrew like some wounded animal into its lair. When Gautier met him, a grey-haired man, thirty years later, and greeted him with the question: "When is the next collection of poems to appear?" Old O'Neddy answered, with a sigh: "Oh! quand il n'y aura pas de bourgeois!" It might have been supposed that his powers of production were exhausted. After his death, however, whole reams of beautiful lyric poetry were found among his papers. The market value of his first book is now 300 francs, which is certainly more than its author earned by all that he wrote.
Théophile Dondey's early poems are quite as immature and as defiant as Borel's. In the preface to Feu et Flamme he begs his greater comrades-in-arms to receive him into their fellowship; for, he writes, "like you I despise with all my soul the social order and the political order which is its excrement (!); like you I scoff at the priority of age in literature and in the Academy; like you I am left incredulous and cold by the magniloquence and the tinsel of the religions of the world; like you I am kindled to pious emotion only by poetry, the twin sister of God." He is restless, excited, overstrained; sometimes he is ill, sometimes haunted by the thought of suicide; and everything is expressed in verses chiselled by the hand of a master. One of the outbursts in the suicidal strain is very original. By upholding the doctrine of the Trinity (in which he does not believe) the poet makes of Christ's sacrificial death the model suicide:
"Va, que la mort soit ton refuge!
À l'exemple du Rédempteur,
Ose à la fois être le juge,
La victime et l'exécuteur."[3]
Those of O'Neddy's poems which do not deal with his own personality are all devoted to the cause of free thought and the coming republic. But by far the greater number are profoundly personal, about seven-eighths being love poems. A distinguished lady honoured him, the nameless, poor plebeian, with her love, and the poems overflow with melancholy rapture and idolisation of the beloved; but, feeling, and knowing himself to be, ill, O'Neddy is certain that happiness is not for him, and involuntarily couples the thought of love with the thought of death.
The poetic form which as a youth he sought and found, was one which satisfied himself, because it was an exactly suitable vehicle for his feelings and thoughts; but he did not, like more fortunate poets, succeed in imparting transparency and attractiveness to this form. Therefore the reading public turned its back on him. He felt himself ever more and more forgotten by life, doomed to die with unused powers; again and again in his posthumous poems he calls himself a living corpse. Here, for example, is one of his sonnets:
"Un montagnard avait une excellente épée
Qu'il laissait se rouiller dans un coin obscur.
Un jour elle lui dit:—Que ce repos m'est dur!
Guerrier, si tu voulais!... Ma lame est bien trempée.
Dans tes rudes combats, sur la côte escarpée
Elle vaudrait, au bout de ton bras ferme et sûr,
Les autres espadons qui brillent sous ce mur.
Pourquoi seule entre tous est-elle inoccupée?—
Je suis comme ce glaive et je dis au destin:
Pourquoi seul de mon type ai-je un sort clandestin?
Ignores-tu quelle est la trempe de mon âme?
Elle pourrait jeter de glorieux reflets,
Si ta droite au soleil faisait jouer sa lame!
Elle est d'un noble acier!... Destin, si tu voulais!..."
But destiny, according to its custom and nature, was inexorable. Like the shipwrecked man clinging to his rock, waiting for a ship to appear on the horizon and come to his rescue, O'Neddy waited—waited for years; but the ship of destiny sailed past and left him standing alone on his rock. When the lady who had loved him deserted him he gave up all hope. His poetry meanwhile had been gradually assuming a more serious and philosophic cast. In one poem, reversing the Cartesian axiom, he declares: "I suffer, therefore I am." And many other beautiful poems are pessimistic in a degree which is uncommon in Romantic lyric verse. Read, for instance, the following lines: