Pushkin’s generation had already surmounted Chénier, because there had been Byron. One and the same generation could not grasp simultaneously “the sound of the new, miraculous lyre, the sound of the lyre of Byron,” and the abstract, externally cold and rational poetry of Chénier which was nevertheless full of the obsessed rage of antiquity.
That by which Chénier still spiritually burned—the Encyclopedia, Deism, the rights of man—was already for Pushkin the past, pure literature:
. . . Diderot sat down on his rickety three-legged stool,
Threw off his wig, shut his eyes in rapture,
And preached away . . .
The Pushkinian formula—the union of mind and the furies—contains the two elements of the poetry of Chénier. The age was such that no one managed to escape obsession. Only its direction changed and it went off, now into the pathos of restraint, now into the power of the accusatory iamb.
The iambic spirit descends upon Chénier like a fury. The imperative. The Dionysian character. Obsession.
Chénier would never have said, “You live for life’s sake.” He was completely removed from the Epicureanism of the age, from the Olympianism of the bigwigs and aristocracy.
Pushkin is more objective and more dispassionate, than Chénier in his appraisal of the French Revolution. Where Chénier feels only hatred and a living anguish, Pushkin knows how to contemplate and has historical perspective: “Do you remember as well, Trianon, the whir of those times of fun?”
Allegorical poetics. Very broad allegories, by no means fleshless, among them, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity—for the poet and his time these are almost living persons and interlocutors. He tries to capture their features, he senses their warm breathing.
In “Jeu de paume” one observes a struggle between a journalistic theme and the iambic spirit. Almost the entire poem is in thrall to the newspaper.
The commonplace of a journalistic style:
Pères d’un peuple, architectes des lois!
Vous qui savez fonder d’une main ferme et sûre
Pour l’homme un code solonnel.3
The Classical idealization of contemporaneity: the crowd of the estates’ representatives, making their way to the riding hall, accompanied by the people, is compared with the pregnant Latona, almost a mother.
Comme Latone enceinte, et déjà presque mère,
Victime d’un jaloux pouvoir,
Sans asile flottait, courait la terre entière.4
The dissolution of the world into intelligently operating forces. The only one who turns out to be singularly unintelligent is man. The entire poetics of civil poetry is a search for curbs—frein: “. . . l’oppresseur n’est jamais libre . . .”5
What are Chénier’s poetics? Maybe he has not one but several in different periods or, more precisely, moments of poetic consciousness?
These can be differentiated: the pastoral-shepherdly (Bucoliques, Idylles)6 and the grandiose construction of an almost “Scientific Poetry.”
Is the influence of Montesquieu and of English common law on Chénier not confirmed, in connection with his stay in England? Isn’t there anything he wrote, like the Pushkinian line, “Here a flaming onslaught, there a stern rebuff . . .”? Or is his abstract mind alien to Pushkinian practicality?
Although the Old French literary tradition had been completely forgotten, some of its devices went on being automatically reproduced, because they had entered into the blood.
Strange, after the antique elegy with all its accessories, where there are the earthenware jug, the reed, the brook, the beehive, the rosebush, the swallow, and the friends and interlocutors and witnesses and spies of the lovers, to find in Chénier an inclination to a completely worldly elegy in the spirit of the Romantics; almost Musset-like, as, for example, the third elegy to “Camille,” a worldly love letter delicately unforced and agitated, where the epistolary form is almost liberated from its mythological contingencies, and the animated conversational style of a man who thinks and feels in the Romantic manner flows freely forth:
Et puis d’un ton charmant, la lettre me demande
Ce que je veux de toi, ce que je te commande!
Ce que je veux! dis-tu. Je veux que ton retour
Te paraisse bien lent; je veux que nuit et jour
Tu m’aimes (nuit et jour hèlas! je me tourmente).
Présente au milieu d’eux, sois seule, sois absente;
Dors en pensant à moi! rêve-moi près de toi;
Ne vois que moi sans cesse, et sois toute avec moi.7
In these lines one hears Tatiana’s letter to Onegin, the same domesticity of language, the same sweet heedlessness, better than any caution, and it is just as much at the heart of the French language, just as spontaneous in French as Tatiana’s letter is in Russian. For us, through the crystal of the Pushkinian lines, these lines sound almost Russian:
The pink wafer goes dry
On the inflamed tongue.
Thus in poetry the boundaries of the national are destroyed, and the elements of one language exchange greetings with those of another over the heads of space and time, for all languages are linked by a fraternal bond, which strengthens itself on the freedom and domesticity of each, and within this freedom they are fraternally akin, and, each from its own home, they call out to each other.
François Villon
Astronomers accurately predict the return of a comet after a long interval of time. For those who know Villon, the phenomenon of Verlaine presents just such an astronomic wonder. The vibrations of these two voices are strikingly similar. Yet, in addition to tone of voice and biography, the two poets are linked by an almost identical mission with regard to the literature contemporary to them. Both were fated to emerge in epochs of artificial hothouse poetry, and, just as Verlaine destroyed the serres chaudes of Symbolism, Villon flung his challenge to the powerful Rhetorical school, which could quite rightly be considered the Symbolism of the fifteenth century. The well-known Roman de la Rose built for the first time the impermeable wall within which that tepid atmosphere went on thickening, which the allegories created by this Romance needed in order to breathe. Love, Danger, Hatred, Perfidy are not dead abstractions. They are not fleshless. Medieval poetry lends these phantoms an astral body as it were and fusses tenderly over the artificial atmosphere so vital to the support of their fragile existence. The garden where these peculiar personages live is enclosed by a high wall. The lover, as the beginning of the Roman de la Rose narrates, has been wandering around this wall for a long time in a vain search for the elusive entry.
Poetry and life in the fifteenth century were two independent, hostile dimensions. It is difficult to believe that Maître Alain Chartier was subjected to real persecution and suffered mundane discomforts after having incensed the public opinion of his day by too stern a judgment on the Cruel Lady, whom he drowned in the well of tears, after a brilliant trial which observed all the niceties of medieval jurisprudence. Fifteenth-century poetry was autonomous: the place it occupied in the culture of its time resembled that of a state within the state. Let us recall the Court of Love of Charles VI: there were over seven hundred varied official ranks, beginning with the highest signory and ending with petty bourgeois and lower clercs. The exclusively literary nature of this institution explains its contempt for social partitioning. The hypnotic power of literature was so great that members of similar associations wandered about the streets adorned with green wreaths—the symbol of being in love—wishing to extend the literary dream into reality.