ART. XII.-Chansons Nouvelles et Dernières, de P. J. DE BERANGER. Dédiées à M. LUCIEN BUONAPARTE. Paris: 1833. W HEN we last introduced Beranger to the notice of our readers, his fame, though little known beyond his own country, had reached its height in France. Ardent and enthusiastic, sad and gay by turns, witty and yet natural,—with all their simplicity of expression, dignified and forcible,—his songs had become familiar as household words in the hearts and mouths of his countrymen. Prosecution and fine had increased, if that were possible, his popularity; and had endeared still more to the public the poet who appeared to them to have been a sufferer in their cause. On the mind of the poet himself they had produced their natural impression. What terrors indeed could a fine of three hundred francs and a year's imprisonmentcheered, as it was, by constant visits and expressions of sympathy from distinguished men of all parties-have for one to whom the gloomy apartments of La Force could hardly appear more desolate than the tailor's garret where he had passed his youth? They had none. The solitude of his prison seemed only to render his fancy more active ;-his penance to give additional point, force, and boldness to his political allusions. The poet of the people-the title to which his claim was now universally recog'nised-even from his prison continued to launch forth those epigrammatic traits of irresistible satire which linger in the popular memory, and silently prepare the fall of dynasties, by exposing them to that which in France is omnipotent, contempt. A change not unnatural or unpleasing has come over his mind since those days of young enthusiasm, of suffering and triumph. We have here the last volume of his songs-not, indeed, as he tells us in his preface, the last he may write, but the last he intends to publish. Helas! helas! j'ai cinquante ans,' might have been the appropriate title of more than one of the songs it contains. Gaiety is not, indeed, excluded from its pages, but it is more tempered than of old, and recurs more seldom ; and often some sad recollection suddenly arising from the heart, comes over his spirit like a cloud, and converts the smile unawares into a tear. One change, we are sure, no one who is interested in Beranger's fame can regret. It was unworthy of his great and varied powers to be, as he too often was, the poet of licentiousness; it was an insult to that people, whose poetical high-priest he aspired to be, to hold out to the world that these were the compositions which they delighted to honour. His best friend will not deny that he has written many lines which, when dying, he would wish to blot. We are sure he feels and regrets this himself; of which the best proof is, that in the present volume, the product of his riper experience, and juster appreciation of what is due to himself and to public morals, his purer taste has discarded these blemishes, and banished the Margots, Lises, and Roses to that obscurity from which a poet's hand should never have withdrawn them. A sly allusion, a hint sufficiently vocal to the 'intelligent,' no doubt occasionally occurs even in these his purer lays. We see plainly enough that they are the work of one who, like Shallow, has heard the chimes at midnight' a little too often, and who in his youthful days had been no enemy to 'cakes and ale.' But there is nothing offensive in these sallies; and the future editor of a Family Beranger, while he more than decimates his former volumes, will probably content himself with erasing a few stanzas from the present. To the graver views which advancing years naturally produce in any mind, has been added, in Beranger's case, the seriousness which political convulsions, and a somewhat clouded and menacing future, necessarily awaken in minds which, like his, find their happiness beyond the narrow sphere of self; and whose sympathies and interests are bound up with the well-being of society around them. Beranger has, in fact, been placed, since the Revolution of 1830, in a very painful and embarrassing position. He has seen the desire of his soul, but he is not satisfied. The elder branch of the Bourbons, the victims against whom he aimed his incessant fire of 'paper pellets of the brain,' has been expelled. No Marchangys and Bellarts now exist to check the free current of his fancy by Dix mille francs d'amende.' The Jesuits, another of the objects of his persevering satire, arewho can tell where? The friends with whom he laboured, for whom he wrote, whom he looked up to as the future saviours of France, were in power; but Beranger is discontented. The millennium which he expected from the Revolution, has not been realized; those airy visions of republican liberty, and national happiness and glory, which had, strangely enough, alternated in his mind with an enthusiastic admiration of Buonaparte, seem to him as far as ever from assuming substance and form: as it was in the days of Louis XVIII. and Charles X., so it is, in most of these respects, in those of Louis Philippe. So, at least, thinks Beranger. 'Je croyais qu'on allait faire Même etendré un peu la sphére Chanson, reprends ta couronne— La planete doctrinaire, Aux gens de Juillet Fi d'un froid soleil d' automne De brume obscurci : Chanson, reprends ta couronne— Messieurs grand merci !' Most men will probably think that the fault rather lies in the extravagant and impracticable expectations of the poet, than in the limited performance of his friends the Ministers; but be that as it may, Beranger is obviously placed in a situation not a little injurious to the free exercise of his talents. Like Balak, his disposition is obviously to curse, but considerations of old attachments, and personal friendships, and perhaps the increasing doubt whether another change would be more calculated to further his views than the last, restrain his satirical vein; and as a compromise between his convictions and his feelings, he avoids almost entirely the themes to which his mind seemed formerly to turn with peculiar predilection. With the exception of one or two dashing, but somewhat noisy, effusions, on that safe theme, the Three Days of July,' there is scarcely an allusion to recent events in the present volume. Its political songs bear reference to the period of his contests with the former government, and his imprisonment in La Force after his second conviction under Charles X. In the few compositions where he does advert to things as they are, there is an air of reserve, a feeling of despondency which contrasts strangely with the earlier vivacity, confidence, and openness of his muse. They are neither animated by the spirit of hope, nor the excitement of a rooted and uncompromising hostility. Contrary, therefore, to what has generally been the case, the political songs in the present volume will be found the least interesting part of its contents, even to the general class of readers. The volume is dedicated, with a highly honourable feeling of gratitude, to one who had been his early benefactor, though he has for sometime ceased to occupy a prominent position on the public eye. In 1803, poor, unknown, with no resources but what his talent for song afforded, without a friend to apply to, Beranger ventured to address a letter to the brother of the First Consul, Lucien Buonaparte, soliciting his patronage. He had already encountered so many disappointments, that he scarcely flattered himself with the least hope of success from this new application. To his surprise, however, he received, in three days, an answer from the Prince, containing the most flattering encouragement, as well as more substantial assistance. When Lucien afterwards quitted France, he gave Beranger a new proof of the interest he felt in his fortunes, by assigning in his favour the pension allowed him by the Academy. For these acts of kindness and generosity bestowed upon him, at a time when such favours were of more value to him than they could now be, Beranger seems ever to have retained the warmest gratitude; and the dedication of the present volume, couched in language of warm admiration and attachment, evinces at once the sincerity and the permanence of his feelings. That Beranger is a poet of highly original and varied talent, no one, we suppose, will now attempt to dispute. In his own country, with the exception of Lamartine, he stands confessedly at the head of the poets of the time; and so little do the respective provinces of these distinguished rivals interfere, that each may be said to be sovereign within his own domain. But great as is the talent and extensive the resources of Beranger, we cannot help doubting whether the universal homage which his genius has met with in other countries be altogether sincere ;-whether many of those peculiarities which endear him so much to his own countrymen, and which have entered so materially into the grounds of his popularity there, can, or even ought to be, felt and relished by foreigners as they are by Frenchmen; and whether, in short, the vanity of pretending to that full and minute acquaintance with the niceties of a foreign idiom and delicacies of allusion, which the study of Beranger's works is admitted on all hands to presuppose, may not, to a considerable degree, be at the bottom of that general and indiscriminating chorus of admiration with which his successive publications have been received by our Critical Journals. We shall by and by state shortly how far we are inclined to depart from some of those received opinions; in the meantime, we may advert to one or two circumstances which we think must always prevent Beranger from ever occupying in other countries, and particularly in our own, the same high and commanding rank which he unquestionably occupies in the literature of France. The first of these is the different rank and importance of songwriting in the two countries; a difference arising essentially out of the absolute contrat which they present in point of national VOL. LVII. NO. CXVI. 2 I character. The man who observed that, provided he had the making of the national songs, he cared little who had the making of the laws, uttered an observation in which there was much point and truth, as applied to France, but none whatever as applied to England. Song has never, with us, attained the dignity and importance of a political agent. We grumble abundantly, in prose, over our taxes and national debt, and make it clear as daylight, in occasional pamphlets, or more deliberate octavos, that we are a very miserable and long-suffering people. But the resources of rhyme, of popular ridicule, and music, seem scarcely to have occurred to us as agents in the work of political regeneration. Feeling seriously and permanently, we speak the language of seriousness, and seem, in our appeals to others, to disdain the use of any means of producing effect less earnest or straightforward than those which have influenced ourselves. They manage these things, if not better, at least very differently, in France. There song has, from the first, had its grave and important office. In times of despotism, it was the safety-valve by which the pent-up vapour of popular discontent found a ready, and it was then thought, a harmless vent. In more modern times, it has invariably been the subtilest and most irresistible instrument by which obnoxious men or measures have been assailed. Vivacious, sensitive, versatile, with an inexhaustible exchequer of self-complacency and good-humour at command, the Frenchman passes rapidly from the sense of suffering to the perception of every thing which is, or can be rendered ridiculous in the man, woman, or thing, which has been the source of his annoyance. Is he jilted? he puts his perfidious mistress to death by an epigram. Is he roughly handled by the ministry? he makes their lives miserable by a chanson.' Is his vanity mortified by the success of a literary rival? he withers his laurels by a parody. Ridicule, in some shape or other, is in France the universal solvent, which nothing can resist an instrument applied indiscriminately to all purposes, good or bad, mean or magnificent; now shaming men out of their vices or absurdities, where a graver monitor would have sought entrance in vain,-now blighting, with its touch, the warmest emotions, and the most generous sentiments;-an unsparing force, which, like the wind, Blows where it listeth, laying all things prone, Now to o'erthrow a fool, and now to shake a throne,' Against a course of persevering attacks on the side of the ridiculous, no form of government, no system of education, no code of manners, or even morals, we believe, could long be able in |