The collection of his last songs, let us say it frankly, has not answered expectation. In reading them, we feel that the poet has grown old, that he is weary. He complains continually that he has no longer any voice,—that the tree is dead,—that even the echo of the woods answers only in prose,—that the source of song is dried up; and says, prettily,—
"If Time still make the clock run on,
He makes it strike no longer."
And unhappily he is right. We find here and there pretty designs, short felicitous passages, smiling bits of nature; but obscurity, stiffness of expression, and the dragging in of Fancy by the hair continually mar the reading and take away all its charm. Even the pieces most highly lauded in advance, and which celebrate some of the most inspiring moments in the life of Napoleon,—such as his Baptism, his Horoscope cast by a Gypsy, and others,—have neither sparkle nor splendor. The prophet is not intoxicated, and wants enthusiasm. On the theme of Napoleon, Victor Hugo has done incomparably better; and as to the songs, properly so called, of this last collection, there are at this moment in France numerous song-writers (Pierre Dupont and Nadaud, for instance) who have the ease, the spirit, and the brilliancy of youth, and who would be able easily to triumph over this forced and difficult elevation of the Remains of Béranger, if one chose to institute a comparison. We may well say that youth is youth; to write verses, and especially songs, when one is old, is to wish still to dance, still to mount a curvetting horse; one gains no honor by the experiment. Anacreon, we know, succeeded; but in French, with rhyme and refrain, (that double butterfly-chase,) it seems to be more difficult.
But in prose, in the Autobiography, the entire Béranger, the Béranger of the best period, the man of wit, freshness, and sense, is found again; and it is pleasant to follow him in the story of his life, till now imperfectly known. He was born at Paris, on the 19th of August, 1780; and he glories in being a Parisian by birth, saying, that "Paris had not to wait for the great Revolution of 1789 to be the city of liberty and equality, the city where misfortune receives, perhaps, the most sympathy." He came into the world in the house of a tailor, his good old grandfather, in the Rue Montorgueil,—one of the noisiest of the Parisian streets, famous for its restaurants and the number of oysters consumed in them. "Seeing me born," he says, "in one of the dirtiest and noisiest streets, who would have thought that I should love the woods, fields, flowers, and birds so much?" It is true that Béranger loved them,—but he loved them always, as his poems show, like a Parisian and child of the Rue Montorgueil. A pretty enclosure, as many flowers and hedges as there are in the Closerie des Lilas, a little garden, a courtyard surrounded by apple-trees, a path winding beside wheat-fields,—these were enough for him. His Muse, we feel, has never journeyed, never soared, never beheld its first horizon in the Alps, the ocean, or the illimitable prairie. Lamartine, born in the country, amid all the wealth of the old rural and patriarchal life, had a right to oppose him, to put his own first instincts as poet in contrast with his, and to say to him, "I was born among shepherds; but you, you were born among citizens, among proletaries." Béranger loved the country as people love it on a Sunday at Paris, in walks just without the suburbs. How different from Burns, that other poet of the people, with whom he has sometimes been compared! But, on the other hand, Béranger loved the dweller in the city, the mechanic, the ouvrier, industrious, intellectual, full of enthusiasm and also of imprudence, passionate, with the heart of a soldier, and with free, adventurous ideas. He loved him even in his faults, aided him in his poverty, consoled him with his songs. Before all things he loved the street, and the street returned his love.
His father was a careless, dissipated man, who had tried many employments, and who strove to rise from the ranks of the people without having the means. His mother was a pretty woman, a dress-maker, and thorough grisette, whom his father married for her beauty, and who left her husband six months after their marriage and never gave a thought to her child. The little Béranger, born with difficulty and only with the aid of instruments, put out to nurse in the neighborhood of Auxerre, and forgotten for three years, was the object of no motherly cares. He may be said never to have had a mother. His Muse always showed traces of this privation of a mother's smile. The sentiment of home, of family, is not merely absent from his poems,—it is sometimes shocked by them.
Returning to his grandparents in Paris, and afterwards sent to a school in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, where, on the 14th of July, 1789, he saw the Bastille taken, he pursued his primary studies very irregularly. He never learned Latin, a circumstance which always prejudiced him. Later in life, he sometimes blushed at not knowing it, and yet mentioned the fact so often as almost to make one believe he was proud of it. The truth is, that this want of classical training must have been felt more painfully by Béranger than it would have been by almost any other person; for Béranger was a studied poet, full of combinations, of allusion and artifice, even in his pleasantry,—a delicate poet, moreover, of the school of Boileau and Horace.
The pension in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, even, was too much for the narrow means of his father. He was taken away and sent to Péronne, in Picardy, to an aunt who kept an inn in one of the suburbs, at the sign of the Royal Sword. It was while he was with this excellent person, who had a mind superior to her condition, that he began to form himself by the reading of good French authors. His intelligence was not less aroused by the spectacle of the events which were passing under his eyes. The Terror, the invasion by the armies of the Coalition, the roar of cannon, which could be heard at this frontier town, inspired him with a patriotism which was always predominant in him, and which at all decisive crises revived so strongly as even to silence and eclipse for the moment other cherished sentiments which were only less dear.
"This love of country," said he, emphatically, "was the great, I should say the only, passion of my life." It was this love which was his best inspiration as poet,—love of country, and with it of equality. Out of devotion to these great objects of his worship, he will even consent that the statue of Liberty be sometimes veiled, when there is a necessity for it. That France should be great and glorious, that she should not cease to be democratic, and to advance toward a democracy more and more equitable and favorable to all,—such were the aspirations and the programme of Béranger. He goes so far as to say that in his childhood he had an aversion, almost a hatred, for Voltaire, on account of the insult to patriotism in his famous poem of La Pucelle; and that afterwards, even while acknowledging all his admirable qualities and the services he rendered to the cause of humanity, he could acquire only a very faint taste for his writing. This is a striking singularity, if Béranger does not exaggerate it a little; it is almost an ingratitude,—for Voltaire is one of his nearest and most direct masters.
There is, indeed, a third passion which disputes with those for country and equality the heart of Béranger, and which he shares fully with Voltaire,—the hatred, namely, we will not say of Christianity, but of religious hypocrisy, of Jesuitic Tartufery. What Voltaire did in innumerable pamphlets, facetioe, and philosophic diatribes, Béranger did in songs. He gave a refrain, and with it popular currency to the anti-clerical attacks and mockeries of Voltaire; he set them to his violin and made them sing with the horsehair of his bow. Béranger was in this respect only the minstrel of Voltaire.
Bold songs against hypocrites, the Reverend Fathers and the Tartufes, so much in favor under the Restoration, and some which carry the attack yet higher, and which sparkle with the very spirit of buffoonery, like Le Bâtard du Pape; beautiful patriotic songs, like Le vieux Drapeau; and beautiful songs of humanity and equality, like Le vieux Vagabond;—these are the three chief branches which unite and intertwine to make the poetic crown of Béranger in his best days, and they had their root in passions which with him were profound and living,—hatred of superstition, love of country, love of humanity and equality.