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Revue de littérature comparée, 2005-01, Vol.313, p.5
Ort / Verlag
Paris: Éditions Klincksieck
Erscheinungsjahr
2005
Link zum Volltext
Quelle
EZB Electronic Journals Library
Beschreibungen/Notizen
Writers like Balzac, Hugo and de Musset had a profound impact on many of their British contemporaries, but for a time Béranger's name ranked alongside theirs; his poetry was, according to H.F. Chorley, "as well known... to most of our educated countrymen, as Molière's best scenes".8 A study of the history of the reception of his poetry turns up such names as William Makepeace Thackeray, Matthew Arnold, Arthur Hugh Clough, Walter Bagehot, Oscar Wilde and Robert Louis Stevenson. [...]as in France, Béranger's appeal was not limited to the upper reaches of society. In an otherwise sympathetic article in Tait's Edinburgh Magazine J.R. Chorley regrets "the tone of more than poetical license" which prevents him saying too much about Béranger's "Lisettes and Margots", though he does admit "that it is impossible to avoid loving, even while we condemn them".18 And as late as 1863 the London Quarterly Review describes the Chansons Morales et Autres of 1815 as "filthy staves in honour of drunkenness and impurity".19 This tendency to "offend prudery", as "Grimm's grandson" puts it in the London Magazine, becomes the principal stumbling block to the appreciation of Béranger's work in Britain.20 The semi-serious hope expressed by the author of an 1833 review in the Edinburgh that it might be possible to produce a "family Béranger" purged of indecent elements is fairly typical of the British inability to accept the sexual openness and casual infidelity of Béranger's poetic world.21 As is usually the case in nineteenth-century reviews there is very little technical analysis of the poetry itself, though the second Edinburgh Review article mentioned above notes Béranger's use of the refrain to "[embody] the leading idea of the whole composition: 'Pauvre soldat je reverrai la France; /La main d'un fils me fermera tes yeux'".22 It is, on the other hand, quite common for reviewers to compare Béranger with other poets, and in these comparisons two names occur more frequently than others: [...]the image of Béranger atrophied for both. [...]this translation, like the others in the Paris Sketchbook, was the product of a collaboration between Edward Fitzgerald and Thackeray; Fitzgerald sent Thackeray drafts of the poems in 1837 which he then revised for publication; see Gordon N. Ray ed., The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray (London: OUP, 1945-46], vol. 1, 330-341.