SOURCE: Vigny: Chatterton, Grant & Cutler Ltd., 1984, 78p.

[In the following excerpt, Buss considers Chatterton as a dramatic defense of the poet and his purpose in an otherwise materialist society, and continues by assessing the influence of this “drama of ideas” on subsequent literature.]

‘La maladie est incurable’, remarks the Quaker and, when Chatterton asks: ‘La mienne?’, replies:

Non, celle de l'humanité.—Selon ton cœur, tu prends en bienveillante pitié ceux qui te disent: Sois un autre homme que celui que tu es;—moi, selon ma tête, je les ai en mépris, parce qu'ils veulent dire: Retire-toi de notre soleil; il n'y a pas de place pour toi.

(p. 54)

But Chatterton, throughout his answer, carries on speaking quietly to Rachel: it is not the place of the mythical hero to understand his own role in the myth.

The Quaker's reply not only points to the social dimension of the drama, but shows also that its target is specifically the ruling class in society, those whose enjoyment of the sunshine incites them to exclude any individual subject to other laws than the ones they have devised for their own benefit and the maintenance of their power. Literally, the class under attack must be the industrial bourgeoisie and the aristocracy of wealth in Britain in the 1770s, represented by John Bell and Lord Beckford; but the scene between Bell and his workmen shows that Vigny was in touch with such events as the Luddite violence of the 1820s in Britain, while the development of industrialisation and the establishment after the Revolution of July 1830 in France of a régime modelled to some extent on the lines of British parliamentary democracy, convinced many of his contemporaries that his real target was the French bourgeoisie and the class, defined at the time as l'aristocratie d'argent, which was rapidly acknowledged to have been the main beneficiary of the change of power.

Vigny himself protested that his play should not be taken as an attack on the middle class, and what I want to demonstrate in this chapter are the sources of some of the ideas in a work which is considerably more subtle than merely a political pamphlet under the guise of a defence of poetry. What Vigny confronts in Chatterton is not just a materialist class but an ideology, that of the Liberal bourgeoisie of the 1820s; he confronts it, but at the same time finds himself obliged to argue his case on terms which are largely those laid down by his opponents. He is not alone in this, since the Romantic debate on literature in general, and poetry in particular, took place in the context of a view of history and culture that was formed during the eighteenth century and, though challenged from the early years of the nineteenth century, retained a considerable hold in the minds even of those who appeared to reject its conclusions.

The Romantic movement in literature and art is generally presented in grossly simplified terms, like a football match in which the new side of Romanticism is pitted against the old guard of Classicists, with their adherence to the outworn dogmas of Racinian tragedy. Of course, the contest was not simply one of Racine vs. Shakespeare and the very wide spectrum of ideas represented by the leading Romantic writers, as well as the changes in their attitudes even during the relatively short period of the decade 1820-1830 (when Hugo, for example, evolved from a reactionary right-wing political stance to a left-wing one), should make us doubt any simplified view of the debate. Moreover, the study of the literary and political press of the period will show that opposition to Romanticism did not by any means come solely from critics who would have liked to see a return to the literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. There was a body of opposition to the new movement, which may be broadly described as ‘Liberal’, basing its hostility to Romanticism on a broad ideology of human culture; this Liberal group was in fact highly influential in French intellectual life and its politics attracted, or came to attract, many of the young writers now associated with the Romantic movement.

For various reasons, it had become a cliché by the early 1830s that poetry was dead and that the more extravagant manifestations of Romanticism were symptoms connected with the exhaustion of the poetic impulse. Hugo, in his preface to Marion de Lorme acknowledges the existence of this view when he says that ‘il y a des esprits, et dans le nombre fort élevé, qui disent que la poésie est morte’—though, as a poet, he naturally goes on to refute the idea. By 1831, when he was writing, even this gambit of putting up the statement in order to refute it had become something of a cliché.

Since the decade of the 1820s had seen the publication of large numbers of volumes of poetry, and a vital new movement represented by such poets as Hugo and Lamartine, the conviction that the poetic spirit was either dead or dying could only come from a particular concept of what constituted ‘poetry’ allied to a system of ideas that supported the view that poetry was in some way unsuited to the climate of the modern age. This view rested on two main arguments: firstly that civilisations developed along a pattern comparable to that of individual human development, from infancy to childhood, maturity and old age; and secondly, that the forms by which cultures expressed themselves also varied, certain types of poetry being more appropriate to early development, others to later stages, and other literary genres taking over as mankind progressed. I have stated this general idea in highly schematic terms, but the metaphors that derived from it and were used to express it, were in fact quite convincing and a good deal more pervasive than one might at first glance suppose. Indeed, it is not difficult to find examples even today of writers who hold to some points of this view: for example, that lyric poetry is peculiar to the work of young poets, that epic poetry is associated especially with the early stages of cultural development or that certain forms of poetry are ‘outmoded’ or impossible to produce in a contemporary context.

Hugo, in his preface to Cromwell, casually introduced the historical section of his argument in the following terms:

Le genre humain dans son ensemble a grandi, s'est développé, a mûri comme un de nous. Il a été enfant, il a été homme, nous assistons maintenant à son imposante vieillesse.

([Hugo], p.20)

And, like most others who use the analogy, Hugo naturally sees his own time as corresponding to one of the more advanced stages of development (though some prefer to speak of ‘maturity’ rather than ‘old age’, however imposing!).

Death is what follows old age, so this analogy with human life had depressing connotations which appeared to be in direct conflict with the idea of progress and the perfectibility of man. The Liberal of the 1820s was generally optimistic about the outlook for human society and would not have accepted willingly that mankind was entering its dotage. A way out of the problem had been provided by one of the most widely-studied literary theorists of the time. Madame de Staël, in her book De la littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales (1800), saw the doctrine of perfectibility as applying in different ways to science and art. In the case of the latter, a point was reached beyond which literature and the fine arts could not hope to progress, while science was capable of unending advance. Not that art would be condemned necessarily to decadence, but its further development would be dependent on that of the moral, philosophical and natural sciences:

Lorsque la littérature d'imagination a atteint dans une langue le plus haut degré de perfection dont elle est susceptible, il faut que le siècle suivant appartienne à la philosophie, pour que l'esprit humain ne cesse pas de faire des progrès.

([de Staël], pp. 173-74).

This leads her to the statement that ‘la poésie d'imagination ne fera plus de progrès en France’ ([de Staël], p. 359).

Though the essential word here is progrès—Madame de Staël was not saying that there was no place at all for poetry in advanced societies—her arguments were borrowed to support the theory that poetry was a dying art and her qualification (la poésie d'imagination) developed as the basis of a fairly precise definition of poetry itself:

La poésie est éminemment allégorique … son attribut essentiel consiste dans la faculté d'individualiser, c'est-à-dire de personnifier les sentiments et les passions de l'homme …’

([Ballanche], pp. 310-11)

What is interesting about this is that the much-admired critic Schlegel had written of Greek poetry that its main characteristic was that it ‘donne de l'âme aux sentiments et un corps aux pensées’ ([Schlegel], p. 30); and Ballanche, a few lines later in the passage quoted above, concludes: ‘Ainsi la poésie des anciens est la seule vraie poésie’. Moreover Schlegel's succinct definition of the allegorical character of Greek poetry was taken up by Victor Chauvet, who wrote that ancient Greece possessed:

… un climat délicieux, un sol couvert de fleurs, une religion remplissant au plus haut degré la condition de toute poésie, de prêter une âme à la matière et un corps à la pensée.

(Revue encyclopédique, XXVII, 1825, pp. 323-24)

And yet again by Michelet when he speaks of the characteristic of the Ancients being their ability to ‘prêter la vie aux êtres inanimés, prêter un corps aux choses immatérielles’ ([Vico], p. xx).

The Greeks, then, in the ‘infancy’ of mankind, had enjoyed a peculiar aptitude for lyric poetry, and the nineteenth-century writers I have quoted were only in this following the eighteenth-century critic Denina who firmly asserted that lyric poetry in the age of Pindar had attained ‘un point de majesté et d'élévation inaccessible à tout autre (âge)’ ([Denina], p. 19), even though, as he went on to admit, hardly any examples of all this poetry have survived! As an anonymous writer in the Revue encyclopédique remarked, summing up all the elements of this particular argument:

Il en est de la poésie pour les peuples comme des illusions de la jeunesse pour les individus: on a beau les regretter; vouloir rester sous leur empire, ce serait renoncer à l'âge mûr … L'idée du beau présidait à la civilisation antique; celle du vrai, du juste et de l'utile domine de plus en plus dans la société moderne. Si ses croyances étaient restées poétiques, elles ne seraient plus en harmonie avec sa raison.

(XXXIX, 1828, p. 117)

The word utile brings us back to the context of Chatterton after what may at first sight appear to have been a long and irrelevant digression. But these ideas on poetry, which constituted the critical orthodoxy at the time when Vigny was writing and during the period when his thought was developing, are anything but irrelevant to a play which sets out to defend poets and poetry against the charge that they serve no useful purpose in the modern world. The quotations that I have given are necessarily only a small selection, but the interest of even the theme of Ancient Greece appears immediately if one turns, not to Chatterton itself, but to Stello and to the scene of the discussion with Lord Beckford which Vigny shortened when transferring it to the stage:

Imagination! dit M. Beckford, toujours l'imagination au lieu du bon sens et du jugement! Pour être Poète à la façon lyrique et somnambule dont vous l'êtes, il faudrait vivre sous le ciel de Grèce, marcher avec des sandales, une chlamyde et les jambes nues, et faire danser les pierres avec la psaltérion.

(pp. 137-38)

There is no obvious reason why Beckford, seeking an image to fix his idea of the perfect conditions for lyric poetry, and addressing his remarks to a poet whose imaginative world revolved around medieval Europe, should have envisaged him in Greek dress playing a psaltery; except that in Vigny's mind this vision of the ideal conditions for lyric poetry was associated with attacks from those who, like Beckford, judged poetry to be out of place in a modern age ruled by doctrines of utility.

Of course, with the evidence of the volumes of verse which flowed from the publishers year by year, not all writers on the subject imagined that the ‘maturity’ of society would simply kill off poetry. Beckford himself admits to having written verses in his youth but emphasises that ‘un bon Anglais doit être utile au pays’ (p. 96). He would have agreed with Madame de Staël when she said:

Heureux le pays où les écrivains sont tristes, où les commerçants sont satisfaits, les riches mélancoliques et les hommes du peuple contents!.

([de Staël], p. 227)

(except, of course, for her condemnation of the rich). The view that social and political progress is bound to lead to the alienation from society of such exceptional individuals as poets and artists, was that of an anonymous writer in the Revue encyclopédique who saw in the United States of America a model for the society of the future:

Ce peuple nous offre une image prophétique des temps vers lesquels s'achemine la civilisation du monde chrétien, temps prospère pour la science, pour la morale et pour la liberté publique, temps doux et calmes pour le gros du genre humain, … mais stériles et douloureux pour ces âmes particulières que la nature, se trompant d'époque, aura douées des besoins du génie poétique.

(XLV, 1830, p. 33)

Who better than Chatterton, tormented by ‘la passion de la pensée’ (p.52), taking on the habit of the medieval monk Rowley, to represent a man born out of his time? It was a feeling well understood by Vigny, aristocrat and stoic, who shared with Chatterton his loathing of modern commercial civilisation.

Oddly enough, however, if there was one country which seemed to disprove the idea that industrial civilisation was unlikely to encourage the production of poetry, it was England. As L. Simond had remarked in his account of a journey to England in 1810 and 1811,

L'enfance de la civilisation est l'âge poétique des nations, et voici pourtant un vieux peuple, riche et commercant, froid et calculateur, plus fertile en véritables poètes depuis dix ans qu'il ne l'a jamais été …

([Simond], pp. 454-55)

But this neither contradicted the image of a society founded on the materialist values of money and devoted to cold science, nor did it guarantee that the poets born into such a society would achieve happiness or acceptance in it. What Vigny and other poets of his time would retain in these comments, was a definition of society and socially useful work that excluded imaginative literature and seemed to force them, with almost a scientific inevitability, into the role of social outcasts.

There were, however, some doctrines which appeared for a time to offer an alternative road. The most important of these, because of its influence on Vigny and some of the other Romantics, was Saint-Simonism, both the doctrines of Saint-Simon and the later development of these doctrines after his death in 1825.

The basis of Saint-Simon's ‘New Christian’ social order was its reliance on leadership by a sort of troika composed of industrialists, scientists and artists. The artists' mission was an almost priestly one, of guiding mankind towards the future (though, as was pointed out at the time, some Saint-Simonists were inclined to give artists the more prosaic role of propagandists for the new order and, had they ever gained power, would probably have been ruthlessly hostile to those who did not share and proclaim their views). What is interesting about Saint-Simonism, in the context of Chatterton, is that it conceded the point that artists must be found some useful role in modern society, instead of adopting, for example, a concept of ‘art for art's sake’, or a view of artists as guardians of culture, or entertainers, or those who expressed the higher aspirations of mankind, or some other non-materialist interpretation of their function. As Marguerite Thibert says:

… l'évolution générale du saint-simonisme entraînait la théorie sociale de l'art qu'on y professait vers un mysticisme esthétique curieusement mitigé d'utilitarisme.

([Thibert], p. 25)

So, when Chatterton offers his answer to Lord Beckford, it is to show the poet as the one who ‘lit dans les astres la route que nous montre le doigt du Seigneur’ and to emphasise that ‘nous sommes tous de l'équipage, et nul n'est inutile dans la manœuvre de notre glorieux navire’ (p. 97), framing his defence in utilitarian terms which will not only be understood by Beckford, but which are those laid down by the Lord Mayor and his like as the only terms on which the argument can be conducted. It is significant that Vigny's image of the poet as navigator was subsequently borrowed in Saint-Simonian poetry.

By the time he came to write Chatterton, however, Vigny had become disillusioned with Saint-Simonism, and the reflection of his brief flirtation with Saint-Simonian doctrines comes rather from the episode in Stello (when he was still to some extent attracted by them), than from his convictions at the time of writing the play. Even by the last episode of Stello (that dealing with André Chénier), he was evidently disaffected from the idea of the new social order and had come to hold the view that all régimes were necessarily hostile to poets.

The image of the poet as the one who searches the stars for the road that society should take is strikingly similar to that offered by Shelley in his Defence of Poetry:

Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present … Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

([Shelley], p. 159)

I am not the first to compare this with Chatterton's speech, but I am perhaps the first to point out that Shelley's defence was written in answer to precisely the same view of human history and civilisation that I have been discussing in this chapter. In his essay The Four Ages of Poetry, Shelley's friend Thomas Love Peacock had argued that human civilisation progresses through different stages and that the modern age, with its scientific and utilitarian preoccupations, is necessarily hostile to works of the imagination. In response, Shelley argued the universal validity of poetry, its leading role in society and its moral significance, even when those who produce it are themselves not outstanding for their moral qualities:

But even whilst they deny and abjure, they are yet compelled to serve, the power which is seated on the throne of their own soul.

([Shelley], p. 159)

Vigny could not have known Shelley's work which, though written in 1821, was not published until 1840. The similarity in their concepts of the poet and his role in society (though I would not want to suggest that it is especially profound), can only come from their sensitivity to the climate of their times. In Vigny's case, he chose to depict the oppressive tendency of this society in two ways: indirectly through the person of John Bell, a philistine tyrant who persecutes his workmen and his wife; and directly, as far as poets are concerned, in Lord Beckford, a cultured and powerful man who is nonetheless fatally unequipped to appreciate Chatterton's sensitivity or his genius. What Beckford represents (most evidently in Stello where his opinions are developed at greater length than in the play), is not an English gentleman of the eighteenth century so much as a liberal bourgeois of Vigny's own time and country.

If Vigny seems largely to accept, at the end of Stello, that all political régimes will, for different reasons, prove hostile to poets, in Chatterton he has taken his thesis onto the public stage and made it rather more clearly a plea for positive action. It is a theme on which he expands in the “Dernière nuit de travail”, while fully aware of the problems he has raised. The idea of the poet which he puts forward is élitist—the contrary, for example, of the supposition underlying a modern ‘poetry workshop’ or the publication of anthologies of poems by schoolchildren, that anyone can write poetry. For Vigny, poets are rare and it is axiomatic that the majority will not appreciate them: ‘son langage choisi n'est compris que d'un petit nombre d'hommes choisi lui-même’ (p. 29). After a poet's death, perhaps, his genius will be recognised but in his lifetime he can expect only jealousy or indifference. The state, too, ‘ne protège que les intérêts positifs’ (p. 29). But society can afford to maintain men of genius, it has the means to keep them from starvation or humiliating and soul-destroying work if it chooses to make laws for their protection:

C'est au législateur à guérir cette plaie, l'une des plus vives et des plus profondes de notre corps social; c'est à lui qu'il appartient de réaliser dans le présent une partie des jugements meilleurs de l'avenir, en assurant quelques années d'existence seulement à tout homme qui aurait donné un seul gage du talent divin.

(p. 33)

But the problem of identification remains, as Vigny is well aware (p. 32).

A great deal of this discussion hinges on a particular concept of the poet, which includes in its turn a particular concept of poetry and in this idea, which has been implicit in much of our discussion of Chatterton as a character in the play, as well as in the subjects I have raised in this chapter, lies the central significance of the work. I said earlier that both Vigny and Shelley, in formulating their defence of poetry, did so largely on terms dictated by their opponents, by those who believed that poetry was quite simply incompatible with modern scientific society, in Vigny's own words, ‘une société matérialiste, où le calculateur avare exploite sans pitié l'intelligence et le travail’ (p. 34); a society that was also in the throes of industrialisation, taking men and women from the rural existence which had continued largely unchanged in Europe since the Middle Ages and crowding them into towns where their labour was exploited ruthlessly by the new feudal barons like John Bell: in view of this, and given Vigny's awareness of it, one might question, as men were increasingly to do as the century wore on, whether the suffering of poets (by Vigny's own definition, a minute social minority) was indeed one of the deepest wounds in society or the one that stood in greatest need of treatment.

That apart, the reason why Vigny, like Shelley, could hardly avoid accepting some of the premises on which this opposition to poetry was based, was partly that they were both intellectuals, well-read and alive to the climate of their age; and partly that the literature of the eighteenth century in both France and Britain had been predominantly hostile to what they defined as poetry. Looking back over the previous century, Vigny could hardly do otherwise than agree that its preoccupation had been with the literature of ideas rather than with that of the imagination. Another, perhaps unexpected, point of comparison between Vigny and Shelley is that they both had considerable respect for ‘philosophy’ (the term they would have used to describe the genre which had produced the most characteristic works of the eighteenth century): Shelley once remarked that his highest aspiration was to be a philosopher, while Vigny's poetry is outstanding for its concentration on ideas, and Chatterton, which he offers as a drame de la pensée and an example of a genre which he believes is bound eventually to find favour with the public, is a deliberate reaction against the verse dramas of Hugo. At the heart of the play, there is this contradiction of a work which sets out to define a certain idea of The Poet and to defend him against a hostile society, but does so in prose, in an intellectual framework remarkably similar to the one which it has described as being hostile to the poetic sensibility. The conflict between head and heart, the enthusiasm of Stello and the scepticism of Le Docteur Noir, the poetry of Chatterton and the philosophy of the Quaker, was one that Vigny experienced in himself and was never to resolve.

It is a conflict that belongs peculiarly to the age of Romanticism. The eighteenth century had been well aware of the demands of both reason and sensibility and had never doubted which, in a well-ordered society, should take precedence. But by the end of the century men had begun to doubt whether society was well-ordered and to question its right to subject the individual to its demands. When, in the political sphere, a man like Napoleon Bonaparte could impose his will on half of Europe, it appeared that there were individuals who stood so far above the crowd that their nature would not permit them to recognise normal or reasonable limitations; and if, in the political sphere, such individuals were not an unmixed blessing for humanity, who could deny that they had had their counterparts in literature and the arts and that we had benefitted from the genius of Shakespeare, Leonardo or Raphael? In “La Dernière nuit de travail”, it is the Poet as a man of genius that Vigny distinguishes from the man of letters or the great writer; and if he demands for him a consideration which society can justifiably withhold from the other two, it is because he believes in the Romantic concept of genius as a gift with privileges consistent with its rarity and ultimately so precious to society that it escapes from the usual norms. If men were able to recognise the ultimate value of genius, they would be susceptible to the argument of its immediate utility.

The problem, however, in Vigny's play is that, while asserting the beneficial long-term effects of poetic genius, he has no immediate definition of it to support this view. In fact, his definition excludes the idea of utility. The Poet is not described as a producer of poetry, but as the possessor of a poetic sensibility. As we pass from the man of letters (pp. 26-27), to the great writer (pp. 27-28) and finally to the poet (pp. 28-29), we move from the concrete production of literary works, to philosophical thought (expressed however in actual writings) and, finally, to a pure sensibility where only the phrase ‘la divine forme des vers’ (p. 29) even hints that its vessel might deign to overflow and communicate with the world outside. The comparison of these three portraits in “La Dernière nuit de travail”, when one looks at the actual language in which they are written and notes the transition from the tangible to the intangible, is quite remarkable. The productive writer is treated with moral contempt as insincere (‘dépourvu d'émotions réelles’, p. 26) and superficial; the great writer is defined by his relative lack of productive facility (‘il marche le pas qu'il veut, sait jeter des semences à une grande profondeur, et attendre qu'elles aient germé, dans une immobilité effrayante', pp. 27-28), but is in touch with the society of his time; the poet is not a writer at all, but ‘une nature’, described almost entirely in metaphorical terms: the emphasis is entirely on his need to do nothing, on the idea that any activity other than complete subjection to the needs of his sensibility will destroy his gift (p. 30). The figure of Chatterton in the play is consistent with this view of the poet as one validated only by his inner conviction, his emotions and his imagination. It is no accident that Cocteau's Les Enfants terribles, the twentieth-century work which … owes most to Chatterton, is a myth of the poetic sensibility whose protagonists live their poetry entirely, never attempting to express it in the form of language.

The high status which Vigny accords to the poetic sensibility and the idea that poetry can be divorced not only from verse, but even from language, to become an almost abstract quality, is what more than anything makes Chatterton a work of its time. If I have stressed it particularly, it is because this concept of poetry, this definition of what is ‘poetic’, what the poet is (as opposed to what he does), still profoundly influences our own conception of poetry. Later in the nineteenth century, arguments of the kind used by Shelley and Vigny about the ‘utility’ of poetry were to be abandoned and their place taken by the doctrines of ‘art for art's sake’. Even Vigny puts little conviction into the crowning image of poets as those who steer society towards the future, making it seem more like a witty demolition of Lord Beckford (‘Qu'en dites-vous, mylord? lui donnez-vous tort? Le pilote n'est pas inutile’, p. 97), rather than a serious attempt to define the social role of the artist. In the last resort, the play is a defence of the poet as the supreme individualist, escaping utilitarian definition, the last refuge of spiritual values in a society that has abandoned religion in favour of materialism and replaced its old aristocracy with an aristocracy of wealth. Against the triumph of values he cannot share, Vigny pleads on behalf of the individual and speaks as much for the mute aspirations of Kitty Bell as in justification of the poet she loves.

.....

At midnight on 12 February 1835, Vigny was able to note in his journal: ‘Chatterton a réussi’. The play was a triumph. It had thirty-five performances at the Comédie Française before transferring to the Odéon, and was revived four times during Vigny's lifetime. It has established its place in the repertory of the French theatre and notable modern revivals include those at the Comédie Française in 1947, at the Théâtre de l'œuvre in 1956 and at the Théâtre de l'Athénée in 1962.

In his note ‘Sur les représentations du drame …’ (pp. 107-10), Vigny paid tribute to the actors who had ensured his play's first night success, recognising their contribution to the disclosure of the ‘second drame’ behind the text. I have tried to show that this ‘second drame’ is not only the extra dimension that the play gains in actual performance, but the contribution of the reader or the audience to the action in perceiving the true significance of Kitty's words and in interpreting the underlying meaning of the play, its debate on the nature of poetry and the place of poets or artists in the social order.

As for the performance, it owed a great deal to Marie Dorval, whose acting Vigny significantly describes as poétique (p. 109), showing the extension of the word to more than just the writing of poetry; and especially to her famous dégringolade when, at the end of the play, she collapsed and tumbled down the steps leading to Chatterton's garret. This theatrical piece of business had been kept secret by Dorval, whom Vigny had expected to stagger down the steps before falling on the last of them. It caused an outburst of enthusiasm in the audience which had already stopped the play briefly with its applause at the end of Chatterton's second monologue (p. 100). Marie Dorval was not an outstanding actress but she threw herself (literally) into the part of Kitty and did much to ensure the success of the play.

Despite its triumph, Chatterton did not have the immediate effect of spawning a school of drames de la pensée. It did lead to the creation of a prize for a poor poet by De Maillé, but this was hardly the major reform in patronage for the arts that Vigny had advocated: that had to wait for the modern state with its arts councils and, in some cases, its attempts to use writers as its clients, foreseen by early critics of Saint-Simon's plans to incorporate writers and artists into the state machine. What attracted most attention at first was not Vigny's advocacy of greater patronage for poetry, but his apparent defence of suicide by shifting responsibility for it from the individual to an unjust society. In its widest connotations, this accusation of society is probably the most modern aspect of the play. Suicide was still treated as a crime and criticism of the play's immorality in this respect, based on religious objections, was backed up by the fact that ‘le bruit des pistolets solitaires’ (p. 32) was heard once or twice as young poets, foiled in their literary ambitions, decided to follow Chatterton's example. But the growing acceptance of the part played by social conditions in individual acts of violence, including those against oneself, has taken some of the ground from under this criticism of Vigny's work and is one reason why some later writers saw it as ‘socialist’ in its general intent. The word is, however, wrongly applied: Vigny may have recognised some of the ills of industrial society and attacked them, but he did so from the standpoint of an élitist and an aristocrat, not of a proto-socialist.

In literature, the real vindication of Vigny's support for a theatre that appealed to the mind was to come towards the end of the century in the work of such writers as Ibsen, Shaw and, in France, Henry Becque and others. It is not easy to detect any direct influence of Vigny on late nineteenth-century realism and naturalism in France: the climate of Chatterton is distinctively that of Romanticism. But the play has retained its power to move audiences and readers, its admirers including Albert Camus who cited the play in his speech in Stockholm on receiving the Nobel Prize. The occasion was perhaps apt, since Nobel's foundation is independent of governments; but his prize is hardly awarded to writers at the start of their careers and, even if it had existed in 1770, would have done nothing for Chatterton. The fundamental problem of identifying genius at the moment when it is really in need of help, is as acute as it was in 1835.

The most profound influence of Chatterton is the intangible one of fixing more precisely than anyone had managed to do before a certain image of the poet and a certain idea of poetry. The feeling that the poet was a person cursed rather than blessed by an acute sensitivity had found expression in one form in Byron (or rather in the Byronic image), but was fully realised in Chatterton before being further defined by Verlaine in his study of the poètes maudits. Baudelaire experienced throughout his life the conviction that he was in some way damned and, though there were personal reasons for this in Baudelaire's case which could be attributed to causes other than his poetic genius, his feeling of damnation haunts some of the most personal and most moving of nineteenth-century poetry. Baudelaire, Verlaine and Rimbaud contributed, in their lives, to confirming an idea of the poet that Vigny had sensed in the partly mythical story of an eighteen-year-old English suicide and realised in his play which he wove around ‘un nom d'homme’ as much as the man himself.

In identifying poetic genius with a particular type of sensibility, Vigny had also posited the equation of poetry itself with this ‘poetic’ sensibility. Though a passage in his journal in 1843 asserts that poetry in verse is the only real form of poetry, it goes on to define it as ‘un elixir des idées’, to claim that ‘le vrai poète’ alone has the ability to discern these ideas and that ‘la science est absolument interdit à la Poésie’ ([Journal d'un Poète], p. 72). This drastic limitation of the field for poetry, which poets in previous centuries would not have accepted, itself derived from a definition of ‘the poetic’ which allowed it, despite Vigny's assertion, to be applied to a much wider field than that of mere verse. In the play, Chatterton is presented much more as the vehicle for a ‘poetic’ view of the world than as an author of poetry. He is a dreamer, a martyr who sympathises with the sufferings of mankind, but not a worker, even in words. From here it is only a step to the assertion that whatever a ‘poet’ does is ‘poetic’, and that the poetic sensibility may be divorced altogether from the actual production of poetic works.

It was this that led the twentieth-century poet Jean Cocteau to classify all his work, for its collected edition, as ‘poetry’, his plays becoming poésie de théâtre, his novels poésie de roman, etc. One of the latter, published in 1929, is Les Enfants terribles, a deliberate attempt to create a modern myth comparable with the tales of Classical mythology and a myth that is essentially that of the Romantic idea of poetry. Paul and Elisabeth, the ‘children’ of the title, are a brother and sister who create poetry in their lives: their room is the temple of a religion which is that of the poetic spirit; its atmosphere transforms those who have the sensitivity to appreciate it and who come within its orbit. Their religion has its ritual, le jeu, which is an abandonment of the conscious mind to a form of poetic inspiration; and its cult objects, le trésor, a drawer full of commonplace bits and pieces that they have collected which are transformed, like the words of poetry through metaphor, by being divorced from their everyday, functional significance and hidden in this sacred place.

Because the love between Paul and Elisabeth is incestuous, it cannot be disclosed even to the ‘children’ themselves, so, like the love between Kitty and Chatterton, it is revealed to the reader but not, until the final scene, to the protagonists. Adolescents at the start of the book, they remain children throughout, because their vision is essentially child-like: they are both very wise and very young, with the purity and innocence of Kitty and the ‘marvellous boy’. It is Paul, above all, who controls the poetic atmosphere of the room, but not consciously: lazy, weak (both physically and morally), he needs to do nothing in order to be himself.

The novel is a tragedy and one that hinges (despite the Shakespearean intervention of Elisabeth as Lady Macbeth), like Chatterton, on a letter (actually, Cocteau makes it a more modern pneumatique) and an opiate. The tragic outcome is prepared both by the appearance of this drug and by such indications as the phrase ‘Le suicide est un péché mortel’ ([Cocteau], p. 52) which the children's friend Gérard discovers scrawled on a mirror. It comes, in fact, when Elisabeth discovers that Paul has fallen in love with Agathe: her jealously, her condemnation of Agathe as a bourgeoise who is ‘not good enough’ for Paul, and Paul's inability to express his love, are all distant echoes of Chatterton transformed in Cocteau's imagination and in the context of his story.

However, it is the final scene which most nearly recalls Vigny's play. Paul, discovering that Elisabeth has tricked him and deprived him of Agathe's love, takes the opiate in the room which the children have reconstructed in a new house by means of screens, highly suggestive of a stage set. As he lies dying on the bed, in a pose reminiscent of Henry Wallis's painting of the dead Chatterton, Elisabeth shoots herself and, as she falls, carries one of the screens with her in a dégringolade like that of Marie Dorval, ‘faisant de la chambre secrète un théâtre ouvert aux spectateurs’ ([Cocteau], p. 176). It is in this final moment that the children's love can be made explicit to them, and only then, when they are both on the brink of death.

Chatterton is by no means the only literary influence on a novel which, like Vigny's play, welds its sources into a single work of art quite independent of them. But the influence of Chatterton is there, less in the details which I have mentioned than in the concept of poetry. The children of Cocteau's novel are not, for the most part, unhappy, nor do they suffer the poverty and indignity of Vigny's hero: fate miraculously cares for them and provides the conditions in which their natures can flourish. But they flourish in silence, communicating their genius only to those who come within their immediate orbit, ‘poetic’ in their lives, without ever being ‘poets’ in any strict sense of the term. By giving such vivid expression to the concept of the poetic nature, Chatterton had prepared for it to be lifted away from the field of literature and given an independent existence.

In Cocteau's novel, as in Vigny's play, this ‘Romantic’ conception of poetic genius is contained in a work of ‘Classical’ simplicity. The labels ‘Classical’ and ‘Romantic’ are a convenient shorthand to describe some general tendencies in literature and art; they survive because they are useful, not because they are in any sense exact. Those who attempt to make them so usually create more problems than they solve. In the case of Chatterton, they have questioned whether the play can in fact be described as a ‘Romantic’ drama at all, in view of its restraint, its near respect of the unities, its simplicity of structure and similarities between Kitty and the heroines of Classical tragedy. It is certainly important to emphasise these features of the play which do much to establish it as a satisfying work of art and have helped to ensure its survival. But, beyond this, any debate on the precise classification of Chatterton, any attempt to situate it on a scale from ‘Classical’ to ‘Romantic’, is bound to be sterile. The form of the work may owe something to Vigny's knowledge of French drama of the seventeenth century, but it is dictated too by his need to convey a message and to do so in a way that will oblige the spectator or reader to concentrate on the ideas rather than the action. The spirit of Chatterton is unmistakably of its time, a time which, despite the revolutionary nature of its literary ideas, did not propose a clean break with the past. On the contrary, what is typically ‘Romantic’ about Vigny's play is that it incorporates references to the tragedies of Racine and those of Shakespeare, as well as to the ‘bourgeois’ drama of the eighteenth century and to melodrama. Its hero sees himself as a Stoic facing his destiny like a Roman; but he is also a monk who writes in the language of the Middle Ages, a period undergoing a revaluation in Vigny's day and, by implication, not despised in Chatterton as a desert of mere barbarism (which is how it was still considered by many of Vigny's contemporaries). If Chatterton's genius finds its outlet in a revival of medieval literature, then the Middle Ages must have produced work capable of inspiring genuine poetry. This cultural eclecticism, willing to accept as valid all manifestations of human culture, in any form and from any period, is the only proper context in which to view the so-called ‘Classical’ elements in the play.

More serious is the problem of reconciling what Vigny would have called ‘mind’ and ‘heart’, ideas and feelings. A work for the theatre which is going to realise Vigny's ambition of speaking directly to its audience and involving them in the debate on stage, must convince them of the ‘reality’ of the characters portrayed. The characters in Chatterton have been criticised on the grounds that they are one-dimensional, that we perceive them as spokesmen for certain points of view, not as living human beings. This criticism is partly justified. The Quaker's definition of the characters as martyrs et bourreaux is too neat and too simple to apply: he, himself, is too wise and virtuous to be credible, Chatterton is too obviously the Poet, Kitty the pure and virtuous heroine, John Bell the tyrannical husband, Beckford the self-satisfied bourgeois. Lord Talbot, admittedly, does reveal an unsuspected side to his nature on his second appearance and crosses the divide to come to Chatterton's defence, but only Kitty can be said to develop in any way during the course of the play, as we see her love for Chatterton overcoming her upbringing as a submissive and virtuous wife. Even in her case, this development is fairly slight and could be anticipated from the start. The other characters announce themselves on their first appearance and remain essentially unchanged by their experiences.

This lack of depth in the characters is perhaps a necessary consequence of Vigny's attempt to write an intellectual drama, and it leaves us with the strong impression that the figures move about the stage enclosed in their own private cages—a feeling reinforced by scenes of misunderstanding and non-communication such as that where Kitty and Chatterton speak through the intermediary of the Quaker. Having taken up their positions, the characters never really interact or respond very much to each other: at most, they reveal what is already there. The very nature of the love between Kitty and Chatterton precludes its future development and by their deaths they evade the choice that it would have imposed on them. If they had ever had to make that choice, they would perhaps have uncovered something in their natures other than these ideals of the martyred poet and the pure heroine which are all that we see of them. As it is, it is impossible to guess how they would have resolved their dilemma or what they would have become in doing so. Taking the immature solution of suicide (or the ideal one of a broken heart), they never have to face the complications of maturity.

Despite this, there are two reasons why the play remains an outstanding work of drama. The first is the language, which Vigny makes appropriate to his characters and which he uses to create an inner world of meanings and correspondences so that a refined and fairly restricted vocabulary becomes an instrument of considerable power. The second is that the play is recognisably a myth in which we can accept that the characters represent ideas outside themselves and pursue their own courses along predestined lines. This feeling of myth is aided not only by the simplicity of the language. Rather than a vast melodrama on the model of Hernani or Ruy Blas, this is a compressed work, for quartet rather than full orchestra, introducing, interweaving and recalling its insistent themes.

It would be fascinating to see it revived by an imaginative modern director. The concept of poetry that Vigny defends and his understanding of individual psychology may no longer correspond to those of our own time, but the play has an inner consistency that makes it more than an historical curiosity or a memorial to the Romantic ethos. Its author was perhaps wrong in thinking that he had pioneered a trend in drama when he wrote: ‘Cette porte est ouverte à présent …’ (p. 109); but in another sense his confidence was justified, as the artist is always justified in the realisation that he has created a work of art that will endure even when those who enjoy it have ceased to share the ideas it puts forward. This guide has attempted to show that beneath its relatively simple surface it conceals an intricate structure and in analysing this and the ideological framework of the play, I have tried also to suggest some of the many possible approaches to it.

Works Cited

1. Chatterton. Quitte pour la peur. Introduction by F. Germain (Paris, Garnier-Flammarion, 1968). This is the text used throughout the guide. All page references, indicated by one number in parentheses after the reference, are to this edition. All other references give the number of the work in this bibliography, in italics, followed by the page number.

2. Chatterton. Critical edition published by Liano Petroni (Bologna, Pàtron, 1962). A full critical edition, with an introduction and notes.

3. Chatterton. Edited by Martin B. Friedman, with an introduction by Henri Payre (Paris, Didier, 1967).

4. Chatterton. Edited by Jean Delume (Paris, Bordas, 1969). Two easily-obtainable school editions with useful notes and other material in French.

5. Journal d'un poète. Extracts edited by B. Grillet (Paris, Larousse, 1951). A text in the well-known Classiques Larousse series.

6. Lettres inédites … au marquis et à la marquise de la Grange (1827-1861). Published by Albert de Luppé (Paris, Conard, 1914).

7. Stello. Daphné. Edited by F. Germain (Paris, Garnier, 1970).

8. Ballanche, P. S. Essai sur les institutions sociales dans leur rapport avec les idées nouvelles (Paris, Didot, 1818).

9. Cocteau, Jean. Les Enfants terribles (Paris, Le Livre de Poche, 1977).

10. Denina, Charles. Tableau des révolutions de la littérature ancienne et moderne. French translation by T. de Livoy (Paris, 1767).

11. Hugo, Victor. Préface de Cromwell suivie d'extraits d'autres préfaces dramatiques. Edited by P. Grosclaude (Paris, Larousse, 1949).

12. Schlegel, A. W. Cours de littérature dramatique (Paris, Paschoud, 1814).

13. Shelley, P. B. ‘A Defence of Poetry’, in Shelley's Letters and Philosophical Criticism (London, Henry Frowde, 1909).

14. Simond, L. Voyage d'un Français en Angleterre pendant les années 1810 et 1811 (Paris, Treuttel et Würtz, 1816).

15. Staël, Madame G. de. De la littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales. Critical edition by P. van Tieghem (Geneva, Droz, 1959).

16. Thibert, Marguerite. Le Rôle social de l'art d'après les Saint-Simoniens (Paris, Librairie des Sciences Economiques et Sociales, 1927).

17. Vico, J. B. Principes de la philosophie de l'histoire. Translated by J. Michelet (Paris, Renouard, 1827).