ch'eti've (from the Latin capti'vus) nowadays means

* sickly, scanty.' (Cf. caitiff'm English.)

I. 28. Le bêlement de tes moutons . . . This is an obvions thrust at the sweating System, so prévalent chiefly in the wool and cotton trade, as well as in the tailoring department of metropolitan industry.

Page 23. 1. 25. Ne fais -je pas travailler ma femme, moi? So far as we know, this trait is untrue as referring to an English manufacturer's wife, who is not even, as a rule, aware of her husband's industrial proceedings. It would be truer in France if referring especially to tradespeople's wives, who hâve indeed very often proved excellent managers, even at the head of such important firms as the Paris Bon Marché, for instance. As to this way of recruiting customers for her husband among visiting lords, that seems to us a bewildering conception of Mr. Bell's. No less strange is his way of harbouring in his private house a Qiiaker and a young lodger, the latter for a paltry sum of money.

II. 14 et seqq. As an idealist De Vigny had a particular hatred for thèse utilitarian principles which had corne, together

Il8 CHATTERTON

with the Orléans dynasty, from over the Channel into the France of those days. * Enrichissez- vous * vvas supposed to be Guizot's ever-recurring advice to the middle classes, and hence the motto of the bourgeoisie.

Page 24. II. 1-4. This is a rather strained development of the proverbial English saying : ' Time is money.' 1. 18. conséquent hère means 'consistent'. 1. 19. Il reprend son li'vre . . . There is a very interesting bit of dialogue betvveen De Vigny and the historian M. de Barante about this very scène : * He told me,' says the Journal (223), * that he had seen Chatterton performed in Petersburg, that M"e Bourbier acted Kitty Bell, though not so well as M™® Dorval, who was beautiful. Then he spoke of the play itself, declaring that it was anti-social.

' A. DE V. This is a very hard stricture, Sir ; I do not know of any means of improving society but by compelling it to pity the very victims of its own faults and cruelties . . .

' M. DE B. One should be impartial ; and, in this affair, for instance, the workmen are open to many charges.

' A. DE V. Sermons, satires, comédies, must hâve no impartiality ! The duty of a poet, of a writer, of an orator is, to my mind, to be partial . . . No vvrong could be redressed, no defect corrected, if the same man had with one hand to thrust at and with the other to parry the vice or ridicule to be suppressed.'

We do not think such a defence of partiality right or safe in the least. It is for the very reason, we believe, that exaggeration is always the cause of excessive reformation, that reaction too is bound to follow. Every human improvement, and especially social progress, is, in the long run, relaxed by such fitful excesses in either direction, the very moral basis of which is unfairness. So true is this rcsult in this spécial case that in 1857 this so much disparaged John Bell appeared to the ultra-romantic Th. Gautier as * the most reasonable personage in the play* (Histoire du Romantisme, p. 158).

Page 25. 1. 11. Finesse hère means shrewdness. Cf. the 'woràs Jinaud, finasser.

1. 34 seqq. De frayeur en frayeur. Why such a dismal prophecy ? Is this De Vigny's conception of female life in England ?

Page 26. 1. 14. T^on âme te ronge le corps. It may seem strange that thèse mère words of the Quaker about the health of Chatterton imply quite a révolution on the French stage. So lofty in its idealism was the old classical tragedy that it

NOTES. PAGES 23-28 IIÇ

would never hâve lowered itself to such commonplace in-. quiries about a hero's physical state ; such personages hadj soûls rather than bodies. In the romantic dramas thèse) bodies live, suffer, bustle, thrill even (though not hère) to an\ excessive degree.

1. 26. ton esprit expérimenté ... It was De Vigny's own belief that poets owe to their poetical insight an uncommon and almost inborn expérience. * My life is two hundred years old,' he writes in his own Diary (p. 24). ' Through fancy we grow older, and we often feel that we hâve seen in our dreams a wider space of time than in our lives. Empires crushed to ruin, women fondly loved, passions worn out, intellectual powers acquired and lost, families forgotten, well ! how long I hâve lived ! has it not been so for two hundred years?' (Cf. p. 47, 1. 10.)

I. 33. la science universelle, c'est V infortune. Likewise, De Vigny had written in his Diary (p. 315),: 'Le malheur, c'est la pensée,' and in his sketched sequel of Eloa, ' Hell was the hell of thought.'

Page 27. 1. 2 1 seq. pourquoi on ne se laisserait pas aller à la pente de son caractère. Is this sad, though solemn way of indulging oneself, of drifting according to the impulse of every whim or vagary, of yielding submissively to ail circumstances as well as to ail men, in accordance with the energetic countenance described in the beginning (p. 14) ? Had not De Vigny himself written on the very first page of his Journal : * Le vulgaire est entraîné, les grands caractères sont ceux qui luttent ... Le fort fait les événements, le faible subit ceux que la destinée lui impose' (p. 23) ?

II. 30 et seqq. On me trahit de tout côté . . . This inactive contempt for mean wiles enhanced by proud self-esteem was De Vigny's own attitude towards his personal enemies, Sainte- Beuve, for instance ; he writes in the opening pages of Stella : ' Il n'en veut à qui que ce soit, de quoi que ce soit. Agir contre lui, le tyranniser, le persécuter, le calomnier, c'est lui rendre un vrai service ; et, s'il apprend le mal qu'on lui a fait, il a encore sur la bouche un éternel sourire indulgent et miséricordieux ' (p. 2).

1. 35. ourdir les fils = to <weave yarns ; hère meaning *to plot.'

Page 28. 1.3. ISP a'vait-elle pas son but en me créant? Instead of Providence and God read Fate and Destiny, and you almost hâve De Vigny's own opinion about our human lot. We are practically, though not mentally, helpless ; we must suffer, but

we may despise. Silent méditation lifts up our pride above every contemptible evil.

1. 5. Est-ce à moi de démentir Dieu? If we were to trust this reasoning of Chatterton, the first duty of a man would be to foUow every inclination, to listen to any inward prompting, y to obey ail contradictory impulses of his nature, and we should call that 'to assert ©ur own self,' 'to fulfil our law,' ' to be true to Nature,' 'not to belle God.' We cannot help thinking that this fallacious self-indulgence is, on the contrary, the very gist of ail weakness, of much unhappiness, of a good deal of sophistry, (Cf. Nietzsche.) ' Self-reverence,self-knowledge, self-control — thèse three alone lead life to sovereign power,' rightly says Tennyson together with our classical poets.

I. 6. En toi, la rêverie continuelle a tué Faction. This is true with regard not only to Chatterton, but to ail men, and especially to De Vigny, whose mental impotence was, we think, mostly due to his inveterate habits of constant rêverie.

I. 16. Elle fa marqué au front . . . This dismal fatalism is the characteristic feature of ail romantic heroes, Goethe's and Byron's and Shelley's, as well as Chateaubriand's, Hugo's, Musset's, &c., just as an unconquerable faith in the worth of human will, on the contrary, characterizes most of the classical heroes, especially those of Corneille, who assert with such manly nobleness : —

Je suis maître de moi comme de l'univers; Je le suis, je veux l'être.

II. 28-31. Amif je faime pour ton caractère sérieux j &c. Hère is shown De Vigny's secret préférence for the simple and earnest and unconventional worship of the Friends, whose Meeting-houses he must hâve frequented during his varions stays in England.

Page 29. 1. 3. n^ai-je pas quelque droit à Tamour de mes frères, &c. Notice the fine page of Stello (p. 19) about love as the poet's truest inspiration.

II. 6-26. . . . faire 'viure les morts et mourir les 'vi'vants. Chatterton's sad career of forgery could scarcely be more poetically described. De Vigny is well aware that his description is scarcely true, but he does not care. For his idealistic purposes, as he has said. Chatterton is a mère symbol, just a name ; that is the poet, according to De Vigny's mind, whatever be the conventional trappings. Cf. the note on Chatterton, pp. 96-102,