...enters room with a chanson of Beranger's on his lips--for the sake of French words almost conscious of tune: his carriage shows him in fancy parading the Rue de Rivoli;--and his hair is guiltless of English scissors: he breakfasts at twelve, and never dines in Hall, and in the week or 8 days rather (for 2 Sundays must be included) he has been to Chapel once." (1) Clough's tone is clearly ironic; the "chanson of Beranger's" is, he implies, as much of an affectation as Arnold's fashionably long hair, and the subsequent history of Arnold's involvement with the French poet would seem to support this judgment. For Clough himself, on the other hand, the encounter with Pierre-Jean de Beranger (1780-1857) was a formative poetic experience. The French chansonnier is cited and named in Clough's work on a number of occasions, and some of the most distinctive themes and features of Clough's poetry are directly traceable to Beranger's influence. Clough's use of Beranger is not, moreover, merely imitative; he tends to insert references to Beranger into dramatic settings that contextualize and implicitly question the characteristic attitudes of the French poet. Indeed, one of Clough's most creative uses of Beranger's poetry is as part of his continuing poetic dialogue with Matthew Arnold; for Clough, Arnold's sentimental misunderstanding of Beranger is symptomatic of the shallowness and affectation of many of his attitudes and beliefs. These widely divergent attitudes toward the work of Beranger are indicative of the two poets' very different responses to the French Revolution of 1848 and its aftermath. Beranger came to epitomize for Arnold the immorality and cynicism that plunged France into repeated revolutions and upheavals throughout the nineteenth century. Clough, in contrast, always saw in the French songwriter a valuable alternative to the sexual Puritanism, hypocrisy, and class division of British society.

Arnold became an enthusiast for the work of the French songwriter Beranger during the late 1840s. This was, in itself, a rather belated conversion. The high-water mark of Beranger's English reputation was the early 1830s; by the 1840s he was beginning to be supplanted by Victor Hugo, Alfred de Musset, and the representatives of the Romantic school. (2) Elizabeth Barrett notes in a letter of November 1842 to Mary Russell Mitford that he "scarcely takes rank ... with 'young France'" and describes the "fierce, wild, passionate, & ghastly character of the present literature" as inimical to the appreciation of his songs. (3) The British reception of Beranger's work was, moreover, always tentative due to his extremely controversial subject matter. During the reign of the Bourbons, his radical, democratic, and anticlerical views commanded some respect, but his frankness--or as the British tended to see it, licentiousness--about sexual matters ensured that his work remained largely untranslated. Arnold seems to have treated Beranger as his own discovery, at least among his circle of close friends. In late 1847 he offered to compensate for sending Clough a "cynical" and "beastly-vile" letter of criticism by buying his friend "the Paris diamond edition of Beranger, like mine." (4) Then in March 1848 he answered a (now unfortunately lost) comment of Clough's with the following exhortation: "Burns is certainly an artist implicitly--fury is not incompatible with artistic form but it becomes lyric fury (Eh?) only when combined with the gift for this. And Beranger both in [sic]--and ex. They accuse him by his finisht classicality of having banished the old native French Forms. O, you must like him." (5) By the end of 1848, however, Arnold's enthusiasm was clearly beginning to wane. When he visited Switzerland in the autumn of 1848, he took only two books with him--Epictetus and Beranger--and soon came to regret this minimalist approach to holiday reading. He was, he confessed to Clough, "getting tired" of Beranger, and beginning to suspect that there was "something 'fade' about [his] Epicureanism." (6) And from this point onwards there is, remarkably, no further mention of Beranger in Arnold's work or correspondence.

This short-lived enthusiasm for Beranger seems at first sight to have left little imprint on Arnold's poetry. His first collection, published in 1849 as The Strayed Reveller and Other Poems, bears almost no trace of Beranger's influence; Arnold goes in for philosophical meditation rather than the "Epicureanism" for which the French poet was notorious in his own day. There are only two poems that might possibly manifest some indebtedness to Beranger. The first is the sentimental "Memory Picture":

Marguerite says: 'As last year went, So the coming year'll be spent; Some day next year, I shall be, Entering heedless, kissed by thee.' Ah, I hope!--yet, once away, What may chain us, who can say? Ere the parting hour go by, Quick, thy tablets, Memory! (7)

This poem is almost unique in Arnold's poetry in using a refrain--a device which is, as Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve and others pointed out, strongly associated with Beranger's poetry--and gives voice to a worldliness about human relations reminiscent of the French poet's. (8) The other poem in the collection that might bear some trace of Beranger's influence is the "Horatian Echo." The comparison between Beranger and Horace had, like the comparison between Beranger and Robert Burns, become proverbial, not least for the way in which both seemed to prefer retirement and simple pleasures to the bustle of contemporary politics. (9) In the "Horatian Echo" the speaker remains aloof from the great political events of the year of revolutions, reminding himself of his own mortality and the transitory nature of all human social arrangements:

The day approaches, when we must Be crumbling bones and windy dust; And scorn us...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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