"What," he exclaims, "has become of the glorious Apollo of the Greek? Where is the sunny ideal of the hellenistic heavens? Where the sacred sorrows of Christian perfection? Poetry is no more a garden of roses; it is a wild field of thorns, wherein he who walks leaves tracks of blood. At the entrance of this Parnassus stands Poverty, whom Virgil places in faucibus orci. Her complaints are in the midst of curses. She holds in her hand a skull, with strings of iron, and she sweeps them as a lyre with golden chords. Behind her are Crabbe, the Juvenal of the hospitals; Ebenezer Elliott, the singer of hunger; Cooper, the poet of suicide, and the author of Ernest, followed by a miserable train of children, whom manufacturers have famished, and young women whom excessive labor has demoralized and prostituted in the morning of their life. Mournful choir, to which these poets worthily respond."
It is not very pleasant, to be sure, for a reader to pass from some agreeable representation to a frightful array of evils. The spectacle but too true of social infirmities troubles the sleep of the happy, and awakes with a start the drowsy hate of the unhappy. But there is no reason why he who suffers, should not utter his complaint. The Bible itself is not a stranger to vehement protestations against the apparent injustice of destiny. When Job arose from the ashes, surely it was not to sing to the passers-by some touching idylle in the style of Ruth and Naomi. He accused heaven and life, he cursed his friends, and his mother, without troubling himself to know whether his sorrows reached the lovers' palm-groves, or disturbed the wooings of the daughters of Idumea. The Sheffield blacksmith, among flaming furnaces, cannot sing the voluptuous sweets of existence. He strikes the anvil with a ring, and exclaims in a rough voice, amid smoke and fire:
"Accursed be the muse of necessity and suffering! Who wishes her acquaintance? The poor, so despised! Write not their frightful history. Pride and vanity despise your labors. Who is he, I pray you, that artizan who uses the pen? What right has he to do so? Absurd rhymer, let him retire and pare his nails—and renounce a species of industry for which he was never made. You are accustomed only to oaths, and you are only a rough worker in poetry."
M. Chasles does not deny the right of artizans to employ the pen. Ignoble or noble—a serf or a lord—whether he is called Burns, or Chasles of Orleans—whether he is a porter, a laborer, or even a drunkard, from the moment that there is seen upon his brow the radiant sign of genius, he is known. To wonder that an artizan is a poet, is to think it marvellous that beauty should bloom upon the cheek of a village maid. The gift is natural, and not acquired; and the mechanic who writes either prose or poetry must be judged with as much severity as if he were a king. It is not astonishing, therefore, that the author of the Etudes judges severely the blacksmith of Sheffield. But the latter seems to have anticipated the severity of the critic, when he says with an accent of the most mournful bitterness:
"Do not read me, ye who love elegance and grace. Alight not, ye butterflies, among thorns—nor upon rocks burning in the sun and beaten by the rains—you may tarnish the gauze of your beautiful wings. But you who honor truth, follow me. I will bring you wild flowers, gathered from the precipice, amid howling tempests."
While we inhale the perfume of the flowers of the heath, we can honor truth, without being foolish flies, and without renouncing the love of the elegant and graceful. Not less did M. Chasles write to the Journal des Débats, a little before the revolution, in those generous words which we are happy to see again in his book:
"It is for you, politicians, to find a remedy for the evils of society. The interests of the masses are in your hands—those who have not enough to eat, and too much work. The verses of famished workmen, which we cannot sing, we weep over. The muse of Cooper, of Elliott, and of Crabbe, is not a muse, but a fury. You are reminded, that in accumulating wealth in one direction, you are increasing poverty in another; and that the poverty which complains at first avenges itself afterward."
I do not know whether these words were prophetic, but I see in them a noble sentiment, unfortunately too rare among those who love elegance and grace. Let us be elegant, if we can; gracious, if we know how. But, besides those desirable qualities of the old French society, let us show in the light of heaven that living active charity which only can strengthen by purifying the existence of the new order of society. The grandchildren of Boufflers, we expose ourselves no more to ridicule in saying: "Monsieur le roi, faite-moi une paire de souliers." The king will make the shoes if it is his vocation. The grandchildren of Boufflers should do their duty—that is to say: contribute with all their mind to find out, according to the expression of Chasles, efficacious remedies for social evils. When workmen are more happy, they will write less poetry, or at least they will write more calmly. See the American spinners of Lowell. Ah! Lucinda or Tancreda has never lifted up her voice to heaven with the despair of Elliott. An amorous complaint suffices her; a sonnet, or a love-sigh, breathed by the light of the stars, consoles her for the labors of the day. American society works first; when it has conquered an independence, it sings. All Americans do not accept the saying of one of their journalists: "Political and practical life is sufficient for man. Imagination is a peril—arts a misfortune." So far from proscribing the arts and imagination, Cooper, Irving, Audubon, and many others are among those who have magnified the literature of their country. But the greater part, with that fruitful wisdom which characterizes them, applaud the advice of Channing:
"I made a resolution of presenting a gift to my country in the form of an epic. But I had prudence enough to postpone it until I should have a fortune. I then commenced to make my business known, after which I retired into solitude with my imagination."
In Europe it is just the contrary. We ask the imagination to make our business known, and we retire into solitude with our fortune or our poverty. Which course avails the more for our glory? Which for our repose?