Pierre-Jean de Béranger

“ However this might have been, poetry is always more at home in excess than in moderation. Béranger was all the more a poet at this period, that he was more impassioned. The Bourbons and the Jesuits, his two most violent antipathies, served him well, and made him write his best and most spirited songs. Hence his great success. The people, who never perceive nice shades of opinion, but love and hate absolutely, at once adopted Béranger as the singer of its loves and hatreds, the avenger of the old army, of national glory and freedom, and the inaugurator or prophet of the future. ”

“ Béranger is certainly the most popular poet there has ever been in France; there was convincing proof of it at the time of and after his death. He had not printed anything since 1833, the epoch when he published the last collection of his poems ”

“ This was the last public event of Béranger's life. He continued to polish his songs in retirement, visited by nearly all the famous men of France. He numbered among his friends Chateaubriand, Thiers, Laffitte, Michelet, Lamennais, Mignet. Nothing could exceed the amiability of his private character; so poor a man has rarely been so rich in good actions; he was always ready to receive help from his friends when he was in need, and always forward to help others. ”

“ He is not one of the greatest French lyric poets, and cannot be compared with Lamartine, Hugo, Musset, and Vigny; nevertheless he has much originality, and is without doubt the greatest song-writer that France has produced. He elevated the song and made it both a poem and a drama, full of action and interest.
Béranger wrote slowly and with great care, and many of his songs cost him much labor. He was filled with compassion for the weak, for the poor and unfortunate; he loved humanity, and above all he dearly loved France. ”

“ Vous qui appelez M. Béranger votre père, vous devriez savoir ce que tout le monde sait: d'abord, que le modeste grand poète n'est pas un philosophe épicurien, comme il vous plaît de le dire, mais bien un philosophe pénétré du plus profond amour de l'humanité. M. Béranger habite Paris, parce que c'est à Paris, et non ailleurs, qu'il peut remplir son beau rôle de dévouement. Demandez à tous ceux qui souffrent, n'importe à quelle opinion ils appartiennent, si M. Béranger leur a jamais refusé de les aider, de les secourir. Toute la vie de cet homme de bien est employée à rendre service. ”

“ Many there delight to know you as a great apostle of the ideas which are to be our life, if Heaven intends us a great and permanent life. I count myself happy in having seen you, and in finding with you Béranger, the genuine poet, the genuine man of France. I have felt all the enchantment of the lyre of Béranger; have paid my warmest homage to the truth and wisdom adorned with such charms, such wit and pathos. It was a great pleasure to see himself. If your leisure permits, Monsieur, I will ask a few lines in reply. ”

“ Béranger had one rare quality, and it was fundamental with him,—obligingness, readiness to perform kind offices, humanity carried to the extent of Charity. He loved to busy himself for others. To some one who said that time lay heavy on his hands, he answered, "Then you have never occupied yourself about other people?" "Take more thought of others than of yourself" was his maxim. ”

“ How much is legitimate, and how much excessive? Béranger himself seems to have wished to reduce things to their right proportions, having left behind him ready for publication two volumes: one being a collection of his last poems and songs; the other an extended notice, detailing the decisive circumstances of his poetic and political life, and entitled "My Biography."
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. ”

“ The spirit prisoned in these little couplets, these tiny bodies, is of amazing force, and has, one might almost say, a devilish audacity. In larger compositions, breath would doubtless have failed the poet,— the greater space would have been an injury to him. Even in songs he has a constrained air sometimes, but this constraint gave him more force. He produces the impression of superiority to his class.
Béranger had given up his little post at the University before declaring open war against the government. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Only, Béranger was no longer in sympathy with public thought; the people do not pick up the arrows he shoots, in order to hurl them back at the throne; his poems, which were published in 1825, and again in 1829, and then sold to the extent of thirty thousand copies, are, in 1833, only sold to some fifteen hundred. ”

“ He heard with delight of the capture of Toulon in 1793 and of Bonaparte's exploits, conceiving a great admiration for the extraordinary man who was just beginning his military career. At the age of fifteen Béranger returned to Paris, where his father had established a kind of banking house. The boy had previously followed different trades, and had been for two years with a publishing house as a printer's apprentice. There he learned spelling and the rules of French prosody. He began to write verse when he was twelve or thirteen, but he had a strange idea of prosody. ”

“ Even when he is sentimental, Béranger finds it difficult not to insert a touch of mischief in his poetry, and, perhaps, while he is singing in the street the blessings of liberty, he is laughing in his sleeve; exemplifying that disheartening maxim of La Rochefoucauld, that there is always something even in the very misfortunes of our best friends which gives us pleasure. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Béranger, in his Biography, speaks modestly of his part in these movements. In his conversations he attributed a great deal to himself. He loved to describe himself in the midst of the people who surrounded the Hôtel of M. Laffitte, going and coming, listening to each, consulted by all, and continually sent for by Laffitte, who was confined to his armchair by a swollen foot. Seeing the hesitation prolonged, he whispered in Laffitte's ear that it was time to decide, for, if they did not take the Duke of Orleans for King pretty soon, the Revolution was in danger of turning out an émeute. ”

“ Béranger has many muses, all of them charming; and, when those muses are women, he loves them all. When they betray him, he does not turn to elegiacs; and nevertheless there is a feeling of sadness at the bottom of his gaiety: his is a serious face that smiles; it is philosophy saying its prayers. ”

“ N'est-ce pas, en effet, de Béranger que l'on peut dire que son bon naturel lui a toujours fait rendre justice à tout le monde; que le nombre de ses amis est si grand, que les villes ne peuvent les contenir ”

“ These casts are taken with mathematical exactness, and subjected to the inspection of a committee, who order any that are defective to be broken. Proof casts of all the best works, ancient and modern, are thus furnished at a small price, and so brought within the reach of the most moderate means.
This morning M. and Madame Belloc took me with them to call on Béranger, the poet. He is a charming old man, very animated, with a face full of feeling and benevolence, and with that agreeable simplicity and vivacity of manner which is peculiarly French. ”

“ She must not be confounded with the Lisette of the songs; the pieces addressed to her (La Bonne Vieille, Maudit printemps, &c.) are in a very different vein. Lucien Bonaparte interested himself in the young poet, transferred to him his own pension of 1000 francs from the Institute, and set him to work on a Death of Nero. Five years later, through the same patronage, although indirectly, Béranger became a clerk in the university at a salary of another thousand. ”

“ During the Directory, attempts were made all over France to get up free institutions for the young, on plans more or less reasonable or absurd, by men who had fed upon Rousseau's Émile and invented variations upon his system. On leaving school, Béranger was placed with a printer in the city, where he became a journeyman printer and compositor, which has occasioned his being often compared to Franklin,—a comparison of which he is not unworthy, in his love for the progress of the human race, and the piquant and ingenious turn he knew how to give to good sense. ”

“ 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. ”

“ His system of versification seemed to be correct when applied to the Alexandrine verse of Racine; but when he saw the fables of La Fontaine, in which the lines are very irregular, he began to distrust his prosody.
Béranger became a skillful financier, and was very useful to his father in his business. When the banker failed the young man was thrown into great distress. He now had ample opportunity to become familiar with the garret, of which he has sung so well. In 1804 he applied for help to Lucien Bonaparte, and received from Napoleon's brother his own fee as member of the Institute. ”

“ Even the best of Béranger’s songs lack any thing like lift and aspiration. They are conceived in a comparatively low tone. The noblest leaven in them is love of France and of liberty. Béranger hated the Bourbons; they persecuted him, but that only helped him sing them off the throne of France. Béranger’s songs did more than any other one individual influence, perhaps they did more than all other individual influences combined, first to overturn the restored Bourbon dynasty after Waterloo, and, second, to bring about the elevation of Louis Napoleon to power. ”

“ Because Béranger, instead of being a tin soldier drawn up to defend public order, as stock-jobbers and the bourgeois and grocers understand things, was looked upon as one of those fanatics who leave the ranks in pursuit of mad ideas, which they take unto themselves in marriage and perforce therefrom bring forth offspring! ”

“ Mr. William Young, an American, has a volume of translations from Béranger. Of this particular song, Mr. Young’s version is so felicitous that we unhesitatingly choose it for our readers. The title of the song is, “The Recollections of the People.” It was, we believe, founded on an incident of Béranger’s own observation; we shorten again by a stanza:
There was not in Béranger’s genius much innate and irrepressible buoyancy toward poetry, as we English-speakers conceive poetry. ”

“ Was schert mich Weib, was schert mich Kind, the grenadier's protest against the supposition that he is tied by the wife and child he has left at home, contrasts forcibly with the sentimentality of the Romantic style. It is only ostensibly that this poem glorifies fidelity to Napoleon personally; what it really glorifies is loving fidelity to the great leader, unbounded enthusiasm for the great personality.
The gift of describing by means of introducing characters into lyric poetry was common to both Béranger and Heine. But Béranger was a song-writer, Heine a genius. ”

“ People were surprised and a little shocked to find the author of the Moral and Critical Essays, the writer of those unforgettable pages on the dreamy melancholy of the Celtic races, the critic who poured reprehension on the frivolity of the Gaul and the bourgeois theology of Béranger, preaching at times a gospel of light-heartedness which Béranger himself would not have disavowed, and regarding life as an amusing entertainment of which we are at once the puppets and the spectators, and the wires of which are pulled by an amused but indifferent Demiurge. ”

“ The songs of Béranger would scarcely be called songs in England. They are elaborate, written in a clear and sparkling style, full of wit and incision. It is not so much for any lyrical flow as for the happy turn of the phrase that they claim superiority. Whether the subject be gay or serious, light or passionate, the medium remains untroubled. The special merits of the songs are merits to be looked for rather in English prose than in English verse. ”

“ His aunt at Péronne was superstitious, and during thunder-storms had recourse to all kinds of expedients, such as signs of the cross, holy-water, and the like. One day the lightning struck near the house and knocked down young Béranger, who was standing on the door-step. He was insensible for some time, and they thought him killed. His first words, on recovering consciousness, were, "Well, what good did your holy-water do?"
At Péronne he finished his very irregular course of study at a kind of primary school founded by a philanthropic citizen. ”