French Classics

by William Cleaver Wilkinson

BÉRANGER.

1780-1857.

Béranger was a song-writer, the whole of him. He was a song-writer and nothing else. It is his own word, “My songs, they are myself.”

Béranger was not the rose-crowned lyrist of love and wine; he was not Anacreon. Béranger was not the hymner of heroes and kings, a maker of odes; he was not Pindar. Béranger was not the poet of the world, the gay world and the wise; he was not Horace. Béranger was not by chance the lowly melodist, who might by chance as well have been a lofty bard; he was not Robert Burns. Béranger was the song-singer of the people; he himself elected to be such, and he was by the people elected to be such; he said himself, “My muse is the people.” In one word, Béranger was—Béranger. There was none like him before, there has been none like him since; Béranger is alone. We do not thus praise him, we simply describe him.

But it is possible to describe him better. We do so by borrowing from Victor Hugo through Sainte-Beuve.

Sainte-Beuve, not in his essay on Béranger (which, in appreciating, somewhat depreciates the poet), but among the interesting things that, under the title “Chateaubriana,” he prints at the close of his monograph in two volumes on Chateaubriand, has the following personal recollection of his own, which, given here, will serve a threefold purpose; that of hinting incidentally the relation of four celebrated French authors to one another, that of illustrating the ready fecundity and plasticity of Victor Hugo’s genius, and that of setting forth in concrete example Béranger’s master method in his songs, which master method is essentially Béranger, the song-writer, himself. Sainte-Beuve says—of course we translate:

Victor Hugo, returning one morning from the garden of the Luxembourg (1828 or 1829) said to me: “If I should see Béranger, I would give him the subject of a pretty song. I just now met M. de Chateaubriand in the Luxembourg; he did not see me; he was wrapt in thought, intently observing some children who, seated on the ground, were playing and tracing figures in the sand. If I were Béranger I would make a song on the subject: ‘I have been minister, I have been ambassador, etc., I wear the decoration of the Order of the Holy Ghost, that of the Order of the Golden Fleece, that of the order of St. Andrew, etc.; and one sole thing at last amuses me: it is to watch children playing in the sand. I wrote “René,” I wrote the “Genius of Christianity,” I stood up against Napoleon, I opened the poetic era of the century, etc.; and I know only one thing that amuses me: to watch children at play upon the sand. I have seen America, I have seen Greece and Rome, I have seen Jerusalem, etc.’ And after each enumeration of various experiences, forms of greatness or of honor, all kept returning still to this: to watch children playing and tracing circles in the sand.” The plan sketched by Victor Hugo was perfect, far better than I have given it here; but the motive is plain, the idea of the refrain. Never have I had better defined to me the difference that separates the song, even the most elevated in character, from the ode properly so-called.

There is Béranger, his whole secret, summed up in small by a masterhand. What Béranger, then, did was to choose wisely, with long heed, some single, simple, obvious sentiment, appealing to every body’s experience, shut that sentiment up into a short, neat, striking, rememberable form of words suited to be sung, make of that form of words a refrain to recur at intervals, and finally on that refrain build up, one after another to the end, the stanzas of his song. He worked slowly and painfully. His genius was never very prolific. The time of his chief fruitfulness was short, covering only fifteen years, the fifteen years between Waterloo (1815) and the elevation of Louis Philippe to the throne of France (1830). During this time his largest product hardly exceeded a dozen songs a year.

Béranger’s first discipline to his art may be considered to have been a certain favorite diversion of his childhood, the carving of cherry-stones. This exercise of skill he practiced sedulously with delight when a boy, and in it learned the long, minute patience of art. The man’s songs were cut gems laboriously finished, like the boy’s carvings in cherry-stones.

Béranger became immensely popular. He remained so to the end. When he died, and it was after prolonged silence on his part—if one can call silence a period marked, indeed, by non-production, but filled with the singing, from land’s end to land’s end, of his songs in every mouth—when he died the empire buried him and the nation attended his funeral. He had been born poor, and he was reared in poverty. Rich he would not be, when a man. He took infinite pains to be of the people, and he succeeded. The people were loving and honoring themselves in loving and honoring Béranger. Sainte-Beuve, with that critical incredulity of his, thought that Béranger carried his demonstrative cultivation of the “people” to the point of something like affectation. Perhaps; but the affectation, if it was such, had a sound basis in it of real instinctive popular sympathy. Still, Béranger’s emphasized identification of himself with the people was not all a matter of instinct with him. It was in part a matter of deliberately adopted policy. He said: