The Press. — London, England, 1854-07-01 00:00:00

JULY 1, 1854. Yittraturt. Memoirs of Celebrated Characters. By Alphonse do Lamartine. In 2 vols. Vol. I. London : Bentley. NOTWITHSTANDING his obvious faults, we have a vague yet hearty sympathy for Lamartine. After more than a cursory examination of his works and his career, it might still seem difficult to determine whether in him a species of melodramatic extravagance or a genuine and glowing genius predominated; but sustain your attention—study the subject out—and you will, in the end, give it for the genius. Yet it is not this which will account for the secret pleasure with which his brilliant merits are acknowledged, or for the regret with which his defects are gently described. We have seen him indeed savagely assailed, and made, even in English journals—remote as they might be thought from the personal and poli tical frenzies agitating at times the critics of his own country—a theme for rancorous obloquy; and we ascribed it to something unknown in the motives of Peelite or Anglo- Philippist writers. He was not answerable for the revolution which bad just triumphed, but he might claim the imperishable glory of having assuaged its fatal animosities—of having attempered, repressed, and subdued, by the most marvellous exploit which his eloquence had ever achieved, the blood-greedi uess of its opening days—and of having persuaded France to prefer the tricolor to the pirate flag, mercy to vengeance, and amnesty to havoc. In its dangerous moment—when nono would approach it, when Fociety held its breath lest the wild beast of the revolution, broken loose and raging, should rend its keepers—the poet, the student, the orator, the pale and refined votary of letters stepped calmly into the gap from which soldiers and statesmen had shrunk in dismay, and with white hair streaming over the bare brows, grown old before their time, addressed to his countrymen those immortal accents of hu manity which, to the honour of his listeners, and surely to his own, were victorious over their passions, and over the unparalleled hazards of that dark emergency. Cicero de served not so well of Rome in the Catiline conspiracy as Lamartine has deserved of Europe and of Christendom in the last French revolution. But if we come to the conclusion that none but" ill•conditioned" tempers can insist on even the obvious defects and infirmities of Lamar tine without a certain reluctance, we are far from ascribing the general existence of this feeling to the mere influence of his genius. We are often hard on men whose genius is unquestionably greater, and still we feel no such regret. It is that his own heart " is in the right place "—that he is one of the better spirits—that his is the taap.i;.,y—that his influence is ever ameliorating, humanising, improving—that all his efforts (abstracting en tirely from their greater or smaller success and power) have been, at least, aimed and di iected to kindly and beneficent ends—that his struggles, whether right or wrong, have been invariably generous, pure, and exalted in their purposes and in their tendency. None that read him can doubt it—there is a. sort of he roism and chivalry breathing in every line. Before such a merit, after all, a higher or lower degree of mere artistic excellence, of mere literary execution, sinks into in significance. We feel that a very different order of valuation must be used to esti mate the glitter of a Macaulay, the bloodless rhetoric of a Gibbon, or the fleering scoffs of a Voltaire. Lamartine's heart is in his writings : in everything he does we see that he is not dead to the lasting interests of men and of society. He is friendly,—and speaks; he is de voured with zeal,—and would be serviceable; he is anxious for praise,—but we verily believe that he would much sooner gain it by deserving the love of society than by exciting its wonder. That is his character, and that is the reason why all generous critics will think twice before they speak of his defects with too much harshness. In spite of THE PRESS. his detects, he has made a name which is very great now, which extends far beyond the limits, not only of his country, but of his country's language,—a name, too, which bids as fair as any, save two or three of those con. temporary with it, to flourish enduringly hereafter. His present work, " Celebrated Characters," appears to be his farewell literary offering to the reading world. He boasts that he has the sense to know when to withdraw, and that he retires, like Rossini, before one faculty is practically impaired by age. But it has more than this interest; for it is, in our opinion, by far the least imperfect prose production of its author; displaying even more than his accustomed loftiness of thought, animation of description and narrative, and felicity of style, with considerably less of the turgid and de clamatory wordiness which disfigures so many of his earlier compositions. The idea of the book is simply Plutarch's idea; Lamartine, however, not incorporating in his labour any of those parallels and comparisons between great men which form the most enchanting and the peculiar characteristic of Plutarch's immortal " Lives." Lamartine's attempt in this department consists '.f an introduction and thirteen bio graphies or histories. One of these is by Mme. de Lamartine—a more imaginative and, we may add, a more imaginary " life," both in sub ject and in treatment, than those which her husband has offered in its company to the public. We certainly do not, and cannot, call it the best article in this miscellany of chroni cles. It is a history of the adventures of Roostam, the Persian Achilles or Hercules (who flourished, or did not flourish, as the case may be), the date of whose supposed exploits precedes by a thousand years the Christian era. On that part of the book we cannot spare time to expatiate further. The other lives are those of Heloisa, the beloved of Abelard, giving, if possible, the real and exact career on which Pope has founded his famous poem—(the love of no woman ever incurred such publicity or so clear and so long a remembrance) —of Christopher Columbus, presenting in miniature what Washington Irving supplies full length ; of Cromwell; of Cicero; of Bernard de Palissy; of Nelson ; of Socrates ; of Guttenberg, the first printer ; of Fenelon ; of Homer ; of Jacquard, the weaver; of Joan of Arc, the greatest and most ill-fated heroine of France or the world. Among these twelve it is to Nelson that La martine gives the place of honour, or at least the priority of place, in his narrative. Here are, it will be perceived, topics to suit all tastes culled with uncontrolled freedom, merely for the sake of the intrinsic in terest they may happen to possess. Those which will at once attract the greatest number of readers are, we suspect, this bril liant Frenchman's accounts of Cromwell, of Nelson, of Joan of Arc, of Fenelon, and of the illustrious, the immortal, the unfortunate Columbus. There are some historical points which we should have wished to discuss with M. Lamar tine, but we must forbear. Yet this much we must say, that, however decidedly Lamartine may fail in certain definable particulars, his work breathes throughout a noble, gentle, and generous disposition, always espousing the hu maner view. We consider his estimate of Crom well peculiarly solid and sustainable—that he was a gloomy and brooding fanatic, much rather than a systematic hypocrite. Men seldom do exactly what they design to do, and therefore, when they do very great things, other men are not more at pause than they themselves are to account for the prodigious result. This is the secret of the almost constitutional superstition remarkable in all the mightiest heroes of his tory. Alexander must be the son of Jupiter Ammon. Sesostris was priest and conqueror. Julius Cresar could not mount his horse with out muttering a charm. Walleustein had his whisperings ; Cromwell his visions ; Napoleon his days, his hours, his appearances of scenes, and his awful presentiments; all these men, and all such, have been believers of strange and private beliefs, dupes of arbitrary and personal prognostications. The reader of Bacon must be struck to find how even his stupendous intelligence was not free from 615 the visitings of this moral " thirst of the gazelle." But Cromwell ? Was it not in him, at least, either pure religion or pure impos ture? Neither. For what has religion to say to his third of September? Where does any known religion—not to talk of Christianity— bid men build with triumphant confidence on their own particular, their own private, appro priated, dominant, fated, irresistible days ? There is real power in Lamartine's record of our glorious Horatio Nelson, whom he de scribes as the greatest naval hero this world has ever beheld. But Lamartino does not seem aware of the whole truth of his conduct at Naples, and relates the story of his tyran nical love rather with a poet's than a critic's pen. - That his account of Joan of Arc should be full of eloquence no one who has read his strange episode on Charlotte Corday will be surprised to hear. Joan offers a thousand times a nobler subject than the heroine whom he has immortalised in the " Girondins," and whom, using perhaps the most audacious figure of rhetoric that we have anywhere met in modern literature, he terms " the Angel of Assassination." But no such strained epithet is needed by the glorious Maid of Orleans. A far higher place in history, a purer cause, a grander career, incomparably more difficult and more memorable exploits and services, and, in her cruel death, an end so much more profoundly tragical, in addition to more illus • trious gifts and a general character more sub lime, render Joan of Arc one of the very finest themes which the annals of Christendom could have supplied to exercise the genius of a poet biographer. The great fault of Lamartine is that he is never, as a historian, to be trusted further than he can be traced. In the " Girondins," for instance, we should like to know what amount of authorities he could adduce to substantiate his account of the farewell supper of Vergniaud and his companions ; and we should like then to range on the other side those irrefragable facts which prove the whole of that scene, with all its circumstantial parti culars so glowingly described, to be one un mixed fiction of the author's imagination. It is a monster instance of intrepid fabrication in a history pretending to be authentic. But we are glad that we can honestly say of the present work that we have not detected any thing approaching to such licence. On the contrary, the author has put great restraint on his imagination ; he has taken great pains to state leading facts correctly; and hence his arabesque superstructure of sentiment and imagery is encrusted to a more solid founda tion than usual. And when we remember that the work recommends itself by the happiness of its design—always the chief passport to public favour—we have no doubt that it will form an important addition to its author's fame. EDITIONS OF COWPER. Poetical Works of William Cowper. Annotated Edition of the English Poets. Edited by Robert Bell. Vol. IL London : J. W. Parker and Son. The Poetical Works of Cowper. Edited by the Rev. George Gilfillan. Loudon : Nisbet and Co. WE reserved our opinion on the merits of the " annotated edition " of Cowper until more of it was before us for inspection. The present volume contains " Charity," " Conversation," and "Retirement," several of the minor works, including " Tirocinium," and the ballad of " John Gilpin." To these are added the three first books of " The Task "; and we suppose that another volume will complete the work. Mr. Bell has many of the requisites for being an editor of Cowper. He has a keen relish for the literature which is at once lofty in its purposes and popular in its character. His mind does not so readily sympathise with the purely didactic, or the merely elegant forms of authorship. Himself a varied and instructive writer of no common mark, his tastes are moulded upon the precedents of English literature. Unlike other book-editors, Mr. Bell's attainments are so widely appreciated that he is above the necessity of writing super- •