# Littell's Living Age/Volume 129/Issue 1660/A Century of Great Poets, from 1750 Downwards

Originally published in Blackwood's Magazine, Vol.xx, February 1876
From Blackwood's Magazine.
A CENTURY OF GREAT POETS, FROM 1750 DOWNWARDS.
ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE.
There is perhaps no task more difficult for an English critic than that of apportioning its just place to the poetry of France. It is a curious fact, that of all the hasty judgments we are so apt to form, and of all the mistakes we are so apt to make in respect to foreign nations, the most hasty judgments and the most inexcusable mistakes are those which we fall into about our nearest neighbours. Though we know her language better than any other foreign language, recognizing it still as the easiest medium of intercourse with the Continent generally—though we see more of France, and are nearer to her than to any other foreign nation—there are no such obstinate fallacies, no such vigorous prejudices among us as those which survive all contradiction in respect to our traditionary enemy. It is true, indeed, that almost within our own recollection—and among the ignorant up to the present day—the same national prejudice, touched into sharper life by the spitefulness of near neighbourhood, existed between England and Scotland, and with still stronger force between Ireland and the other members of the Britannic kingdom. Vicinity itself thus confers, instead of -greater friendliness, a sharper sense of opposition. We make the defects, real or imaginary, of our neighbour, a foil to our own excellences, and feel it a personal affront done to ourselves, when the delightful darkness of the background upon which our own virtues are so pleasantly relieved, is broken up by embarrassing facts and the charitable light of genuine information. In respect to France, there is in England a very wide-spread feeling, that in every quarrel in which she engages, in every difficulty that hampers her career, she must, as a foregone conclusion, be in the wrong. She is to us, among nations, the dog that has an ill name —the man that cannot look over the fence, though another may steal the horse. Germany, and even Italy (though she, being Latin, is suspicious also), may have a chance of being judged upon the facts of their story; but France we condemn at once, without the trouble of a trial. Every party effort with her is a conspiracy, every political combination an intrigue. Other nations we cannot pretend to much knowledge of; and perhaps only Mr. Grant Duff, or or some other such omniscient personage, can venture to decide as to what is wise and what unwise in respect to a political move at Vienna, or even in Berlin. But of Paris we all know enough to know that everything is wrong. Even the small but eager class which, with all the fervour of partisanship, maintains even in England the glory of France against all assaults, does so with a violence which betrays its sense of weakness. Its very heat involves a distrust of its cause, and even of its own convictions. Whether France returns this feeling with any special warmth we are doubtful. The English name and fame attracts so little love on the Continent generally, that it is difficult to identify the spot where we are least beloved; and we do not think that we have been able to trace any darker shade of dislike in France than in other places. But to us our nearest neighbour is certainly the most generally disapproved, the least amiably regarded. The prejudice is not amiable, but we suppose it is natural enough.
French literature has in many of its branches entirely triumphed over this prejudice. We cannot refuse to give its due place to one of the richest and most varied developments of national genius which modern times have produced. In the one particular of poetry, however, we have need to divest ourselves as carefully as possible of every shade of prejudice—for the question is sufficiently difficult without any prepossession to fight against. We repeat the sentiment with which we began, that of all literary tasks for an English critic, that of giving to the poetry of France its just place is about the most difficult, Our own indifference to literary law, and the formal correctness both of expression and construction which are so important in France, build barriers between us which it is almost impossible to cross; and those special garments in which the French muse delights to dress herself have no charm for us—rather the ​reverse. The monotonous regularity of the Alexandrine verse, the heavy and rigid cadence of the perpetual couplet, have upon ourselves individually a stupefying effect which it is almost impossible to surmount. The ear is so filled with this trick of sound, bewildering, deadening as the hammering of machinery, that it is only with a powerful effort that we are able to rouse ourselves to the sentiment which it conveys. From the beginning; we find ourselves involved in a struggle to separate the meaning and poetic soul of the verse from its outward form—a struggle which is as hard as all other struggles to keep body and soul apart, and to understand the heavenly without, or in spite of, the earthly. Something of the same sentiment, in a reverse sense, affects us with some Italian verse, in which we are so apt to be carried away by the melody at once liquid and sonorous of the mere words, that the soul has a tendency to escape us in sheer delight of the ear, as with a piece of music. Some of our own poets—notably, for example, Shelley—have a similar effect upon us, the combination of words being so exquisite as to steal away our interest in the subject. But the effect of French poetical composition is to deaden the mind, not by satisfying, but by irritating the ear. The waves on the seashore are no doubt as regular in their ebb and flow as are all the other processes of nature; but how different from their wild, interrupted, and broken harmonies would be the regular and crisp accentuation of a succession of short waves always the same, balanced to a nicety, and ruled to one correct line by some authority more potent than that of Canute! Poetry, to our thinking, can triumph more easily over an imperfect medium, winning an additional charm from the very simplicity of her tools, than she can overcome the disadvantage of a too perfect tongue, a mode of expression which permits no self-forgetfulness. Thus the very qualities which make French prose so exquisite, and which give to French conversation a brilliancy and grace which no other language approaches, conspire to weaken their poetry, and repress the genius which would naturally express itself in that way. The French writer who makes des vers is at once distinguished, by the very term he employs to identify his work, from the poet in other languages. His lines, according as they approach perfection, become more and more like a succession of crystals, shining each with its own individual and carefully polished facets. They form, if you will, a chaplet, a rosary, a necklace of pearls and diamonds beautifully linked into decorative but artificial unity, yet possessing no common life, forming no "thing of beauty," and capable of dropping into pieces at any moment. The sharp if often sweet, and sometimes resounding and sonorous ring with which one polished bead falls after another, as you drop them through your fingers, is opposed to all passionate expression, and admits of no absolute continuity. No man can be transported out of himself, can be carried away by that divine impulse which transforms language, and rules it with absolute sway, so long as he has to pick his way daintily among the inexorable words which command his attention in the first place, and to which he is compelled to adopt his meaning, not them to it, but it to them. The French poet is thus more or less in the position of a librettist of the opera. Scarcely less tremendous than the bondage of the music to which that humblest of literary functionaries has to supply words of sentiment or passion, is the bondage of the vers. If in the fervour of his inspiration he breaks upon the serried lines, ventures a novel phrase, an unreceived metre, the Academy from Olympian heights frowns ruin upon the audacious rebel; and the most curious part of all is that he himself bows to this bondage, and that the laws of literature are perhaps the only laws, and the despotism of the Academy the only monarchy, against which France has never shown any symptoms of rebellious feeling.
There was a time when England also was bound in the terrible fetters of the vers—a time to which many still look as the golden age, the Augustan period of literature—and which was no doubt made illustrious by such names as those of Dryden and Pope, though it produced ​at the same time how many scrannel pipes once held for divine reeds of the gods and immortal instruments of music, which have long ago ceased to give out the smallest vibration! But against this bondage English genius rebelled conclusively and successfully in an outburst of insurrection which carried all before it. This is the only insurrection which France has never attempted. The restraints which were intolerable to us have agreed with her natural instincts. Except, perhaps, in the person of Alfred de Musset, whom we shall consider hereafter, and whose bolder genius has made for itself a distinct place in French literature, and given to modern French poetry almost its only real grasp upon the contemporary mind of Europe, no Frenchman has lifted any standard of opposition to the prevailing rule. It has suited the national mind, in which there is so curious a mixture of license and submissiveness; and still more it has suited the genius of the language which all Frenchmen have conjoined in elaborating, and of which they have made the most highly cultivated, exact, correct, and brilliant of European tongues. France has pointed and polished her language with the most laborious and the most loving care. Under the vigilant guardianship of her supreme literary authorities, it has grown into almost absolute, if, in the nature of things, somewhat artificial perfection. It is not enough for a French writer to have expressed noble sentiments in a beautiful way—it is not enough for him to convince the intelligence or to touch the heart. The one thing absolutely incumbent upon him, enforced by laws universally accepted, and penalties inexorably exacted, is that he shall be correct. Without this correctness, point de salut in art.
From these rules much excellence results, but, we think, little poetry. We have rhetoric, often fine in its way, declamation, eloquence; but poetry has to be the sacrifice, the victim whose immolation secures all this success. She, poor muse, to whom "a sweet neglect" is more essential than to any less ethereal beauty, and whose "robes loosely flowing, hair as free," should, one would think, be protected by all the chivalry of the arts, walks humble and confined in the classic robes which are shapen for her by authority; or feebly makes-believe to glory in them as if they were her natural choice, according to a well-established natural instinct. It is hard indeed for the learned and classical not to despise more or less the natural and untrained. Even Milton exhibits a certain half-adoring contempt for Shakespeare when he speaks of the "wood-notes wild" of that perverse and undisciplined writer, whose strains the most self-important of critics would scarcely venture nowadays to commend in such moderate measure. A hundred years ago Shakespeare was a barbarous writer to the French critics, as he was to their dilettante contemporaries in England. The latter have happily dropped out of all hearing; and France has learned, superficially at least, to know better, and is even somewhat ashamed now, like all incautious critics, of having thus committed herself. But she has never lost, and probably never will lose, her confidence in the justice of her own system. It suits her and the traditions of her fine language. Sharp-cutting logic, keen and sparkling as diamonds, fine antithesis, brilliant epigram, the keenest powers of reasoning, the warmest flow of eloquence are hers; but the language of epigram and antithesis is not the language of poetry. No country boasts a richer literature, but poetry has never been the field of her greatest triumphs.
It is not necessary to go back to the period of Corneille and Racine, both of whom precede our date; nor even to that of Voltaire and Rousseau, which, though reaching down within its limits, yet are separated from the modern world in which we live by that tremendous barrier of the French Revolution, which changed everything. Notwithstanding the numerous ﬁne vers which occurs in his dramas, it is impossible to attribute the title of poet to a spirit so little conformed to all that we identify with the poetic temperament, as Voltaire; and though Rousseau is, on the other hand, in some respects the very exaggeration and extravagance of that temperament, the form of his writings does ​not allow us to place him on our list. It becomes, therefore, a somewhat difficult matter to choose from modern Frenchmen a representative of poetry. Alfred de Musset will, we have already said, come later; but he represents rather her unique rebel than the regular school of poetry in France. We should have preferred Victor Hugo, as the greater poet and man of larger genius, to Lamartine; but his career is still unaccomplished, a fact which is more to be regretted than rejoiced over, so far as his literary genius is concerned. And in his sphere Béranger is a greater artist, a truer poet than either; but that sphere is too limited, and his productions often too slight in workmanship and too ephemeral in subject, to give him full rank as the representative of art of the highest order. He is chansonnier pure and simple, not to be elevated to the classic dignity of a lyrical poet; and though he is sometimes almost worthy of a place by the side of Burns, the lower level of emotion, the absence of passion, conspicuous in his charming verses, exclude him, not in degree, but in kind, from the highest sphere. We may pause, however, here to remark that, however deficient in the higher qualities of poetry, France remains absolute mistress of the chanson. In England the song (except in some very rare cases) has dwindled downward into such imbecility, that bolder musicians have begun to intimate the possibility of dispensing with "words" altogether, and expressing their sentiments, so far as articulation is necessary, by the inane syllables of the sol-fa system,—a tremendous irony, which, if it were intentional, would do more to demolish our lesser songsters than all the bans of literary criticism. The idea is barbarous; but it is partially justified by the nonsense verses which we constantly hear chanted forth in drawing-rooms, to the confusion of all sense and meaning. But the song in France has never dropped to this miserable level. The crisp, gay, sparkling verses—the graceful sentiment, a little artificial, and reminding the hearer, perhaps, of Watteau's wreathed lyres and quaint garden-groups—the captivating peculiarity of the refrain—combine to give a certain identity to these charming trifles. They may have no high title to poetic merit, but still they vindicate the claim of the literary voice to have some share in all expression of feeling. It is impossible to treat them as mere "words for music," or to throw them aside for the barbarous jargon of the sol-fa. But yet, though so much more perfect than anything we possess, this branch of poetic art does not reach the empyrean heights of poetry; and Béranger, though the finest and most perfect of artists in his way, cannot be accepted as a fit impersonation of the poet. We do not venture, in placing the name of Lamartine at the head of our page, to attempt to confer even upon him an equal rank to that of the great singers we have already discussed. All that we can say is, that he is the best modern representative of the higher art in his country on whom we can lay our hand; dignified by high meaning, at least, and endowed with many of those qualities which bulk most largely in the estimation of his race—graceful versification, correct and fine phraseology, and that curious, vague enthusiasm for nature—different as it is possible to imagine from the enthusiasm, for example, of Wordsworth or of our modern school of poets—which the French imagination loves. His life, too, is one in which it is impossible not to feel interest; and though there is much in it, especially towards the end, to rouse a painful pity, and that unwilling contempt which hurts the sensitive-soul, there is also much to call forth our admiration and sympathy. At the greatest and most critical moment of his life the poet bore himself like a man, earning, or at least deserving, the gratitude of his country, and the respect and honour of all lookers-on.
Alphonse de Lamartine was born on the edge of the Revolution, in Mâcon, in the year 1790. Of a noble family, some members of which were touched by the revolutionary ferment of the time—moderately touched——uniting the grace of liberal opinions and patriotic zeal to the many other graces of their patrician state,—a union which, however, did not survive the hot days of the Terror. His grandfather was an old French seigneur, possessing many terres and châteaux in the regions round, and a family hotel at Mâcon, the metropolis of the district, whither he and many other noble personages of the country repaired in winter, in an age when Paris was not everything in France. M. de Lamartine had six children, equally divided—three sons and three daughters—five of whom, according to the extraordinary custom of the time, were born only to extinguish themselves for the sake of the family. The race, according to all its traditions, was destined to flourish and prolong itself only in the person of the eldest son; and the code of family honour enjoined upon the others a contented ​acquiescence in their sequestration from all independent life, unless that which could be found in the priesthood or the cloister. The daughters had all adopted a religious life, one of them, however, occupying the more brilliant position of a chanoinesse; but they were all driven back to the paternal roof by the Revolution. The second son became a priest, and eventually bishop, obeying the universal law of self-renunciation so, curiously and without outward murmur accepted by these young aristocrats. The third son, M. le Chevalier, was equally destined to annihilate himself for his race; but here a curious contretemps intervened to check the family plans. The eldest son, for whose sake and to keep whose fortune intact all these brothers and sisters had to sacrifice themselves, was himself required to complete the sacrifice by giving up the bride he desired, her dot not being considered sufficient for the heir of the Lamartines. But some spark of originality existed in this half-revolutionized fine gentleman. To the consternation of everybody concerned, he declined marrying any one except the woman he loved; and lo! in the rigid house of the Lamartines, where every one up to this moment had obeyed his destiny without a murmur, the object of all these renunciations became the first rebel. "Il dit à son père, 'Il faut marier le chevalier.'" But the passage in which this extraordinary revolution within a revolution, this family coup d'état, is suggested, affords so perfect a sketch of the singular state of society then existing, that we need not apologize to the reader for quoting it entire:—
My father was the youngest of this numerous family. At the age of sixteen he had entered the regiment in which his father had served before him. He was not intended to marry; it was the rule of the time. His lot was to grow old in the modest position of captain, which he attained at an early age; to pass his few months of leave now and then in his father's house; to gain, in the process of time, the Cross of Saint-Louis, which was the end of all ambitions to the provincial gentleman; then, when he grew old, endowed with a small pension from the State, or a still smaller revenue of his own, to vegetate in one of his brother's old châteaux, with rooms in the upper storey; to superintend the garden, to shoot with the curé, to look after the horses, to play with the children, to make up a party at whist or trictrac, the born servant of everybody—a domestic slave, happy in being so, beloved and neglected by all; and thus to complete his life, unknown, without lands, without wife, without descendants, until the time when age and infirmities confined him to the bare room, on the walls of which his helmet and his old sword were hung, and that day on which everybody in the château should be told—M. le Chevalier is dead.
My father was the Chevalier de Lamartine; and this was the life to which he was destined. No doubt his modest and respectful nature would have accepted it with sorrow, but without complaint. An unexpected circumstance, however, changed all at once these arrangements of fate. The eldest brother became hypochondriac. He said to his father, "You must marry the chevalier." All the feelings of family, and the prejudices of habit, rose up in the heart of the old noble against this suggestion. Chevaliers are not intended for marriage. My father was consigned to his regiment. A step so strange, and which was especially repugnant to my grandmother, was put off from year to year. Marry the chevalier! it was monstrous. On the other hand, to allow the family to die out, and the name to become extinct, was a crime against the race.
The chevalier, however, over whose passive head so many discussions were going on, was not long of feeling the exciting influence of the new idea, and allowed thoughts to enter into his mind which, in other circumstances, he would have thrust away from him. One of his sisters was a member of a chapter of noble chanoinesse—a kind of béguinage, without labour or austerity, in which a select number of notable ladies, each in her "pretty house, surrounded by a little garden," were collected round the chapel in which they said their daily prayers. In winter these elegant nuns—if nuns they could be called—were allowed to pay visits as they pleased among their relatives and friends, and even when assembled in their chapter had evidently a very pretty society among themselves, many being young, and all tant soit peu mondaine, elegant, and fond of society. True, they were debarred all male visitors, but with one remarkable exception. The young chanoinesse were allowed to receive visits from their brothers, who were permitted to stay with them for a fixed number of days at each visit, and to be presented to their friends in the chapter. This "conciliated everything," as M. de Lamartine says; and thus in the most natural way a few genuine love-matches, rare enough now, still more rare then, were made up from time to time in the pretty half-monastic retirement where girls of fifteen still unprofessed lived under the genial charge of young women of twenty-five, dignified into "madame," by the vows of the order. M. le Chevalier de Lamartine went very often to visit his ​8 A CENTURY 01-‘ GREAT POETS.
sister; perhaps it was the only way in which the pure romances of honest love could have had any existence in the case of a youth and maiden of rank in the France of that day; and here, accordingly, he found his bride. The little romance is charming; but scarcely less interesting is the arrested love-story of the heir. Long after, when M. le Chevalier was the only one married of his family, and the broth- ers and sisters had all grown old, the bride whom he found in the Chapter of Salles, makes a note in her diary descriptive of the head of the house, the elder brother, whose determination not to marry had made her own marriage possible.
M. de Lamartine, who was intended before the Revolution to be the sole possessor of all the great wealth of the (amily. loved Made- moiselle de Saint-Huruge, who was not consid- ered sufficiently rich for him. He preferred to remain a bachelor rather than to have the vexation of marrying another. Mademoiselle dc Saint-Huruge is too old now to think of marriage. . . . She is good, gentle, pious, in- teresting, I-Ier features show traces of past beauty. attractive but obscured by sadness. My hrother~in-law and she meet eve even- ing at Macon in the ralon of the family, and appear to retain a pure and constant friend- ship for each other.
How quaint, how touching is this little picture? The great old room half lighted with blazing logs in the great chimney, faded tapestry, faded gilding, beautiful old politeness and manners that do not fade — and the old lovers, for each other‘s sake unmarried throu h half a centu , meeting every evening, with who can tel what ex- quisite old sentiment, gossamer link of tenderness unex ressed between them! The society whic made such a state of affairs possible, and the curious subjec- tion of soul to the rules of that society, which made even a wealthy heir helpless under the decision of his family is appa.U- ing to contemplate; but we do not know if the picture of an old man and wife snug and comfortable, would ever charm us as does this strange little vignette, so full of delicate suggestiveness. Anyhow, it is clear the second sons and daughters of French noble families, the chevaliers and c/zrznoirzexrzx of a former day, have little right to grumble at the Revolution.
There is nothing more attractive in all that Lamartine has left behind him titan this record of the ancient world as it ap- peared acmss his own cradle. In no way could the curious difference between the old time and the new appear more dis- tinctly. The poet makes himself a link
between the generations by this perha too often repeated but always delight ul story. His many autobiographical se - revelations— revelations which became not only tiresome but pitiful when they treated of the man in the midst of his career and afforded a medium for the pouring forth of much egotism and vanity —do not affect us at all in the same way when they concern the parents, the uncles and aunts, who formed a kind of family council over all the acts of the one male descendant who was to be their heir. The after-life of the poet contains noth- ing half so touching or so charmin as those pictures of his early days whicg he delighted to make, and in which he is always so happy. We know no poetical biography more perfect than the chapters which describe his childhood at Milly, the little dreary French country-house, where the family established themselves after the terrors of the Revolution were over. This little tzrre, scarcely sulﬁcient to main- tain his family upon, was all that the proud and chivalrous Chevalier would ao- cept—the portion given to him on his marriage, according to old rule, instead of the equal share to which he had a right accordin to the new law. This some- what quixotic sense of honour, which ms not shared by the other members of the family, was, one feels, somewhat hard upon his wife and children, who were thus ex- posed to the continual interference of his unmarried brothers and sisters, who were much richer than they, and fully disposed to exercise all their powers of animadver- sion, in self-repayment of the help they sometimes gave. Lamartine is never tired of describin Milly, the home of his outh and of his ieart; and never was ome painted with a more charming mixture of grace, and sentiment, and perfect homeli- ness. Happy above the lot of man has been that English Philistine, who first charmed the world by the profound re- mark that the French were so destitute of all home feeling as not even to possess in their language zt word which expressed what we (superior beings as we are) meant by home. How often and with what wearisome repetition has this curious fal- lacy gone from mouth to mouth, in the_ face of a nation which never travels, never.» moves from its fayer, its daclter "ts 5/123 sai, when it can help it—-whose peasants cling like limpets to their native soil— whose romancists are never tired of the cottage interior, the 1/iewr mrzrmir rillaﬁrl »-and whose writers generally never lose an opportunity to commend with more ​than patriotic ardour the one beloved local corner which bears to themselves the aspect of paradise on earth!
Lamartine was very vain and very apt to magnify everything'connected with himself, but we doubt much whether any English writer would have had the courage to describe with equal frankness the circumstances and scenes of his childhood. The great bare salon of Milly, with an alcove at the end containing the bed of the mother and the cradles of the babies; the walls roughly plastered, with here and there a break through which the naked stone was visible; the tiles of the floor cracked in a thousand pieces by the feet of the dancers who, under the Revolution, used the room as a public ball-room; the raftered roof all blackened with smoke; the little garden where squares of vegetables were relieved only by lines of strawberries and pinks,—all these are set before us in the homeliest detail. Nor does the poet hesitate to sketch himself, sallying forth to the mountains in charge of the goats along with the other village boys, just such a little figure as Edouard Frere delights to paint—barefoot, bareheaded, in little coat of coarse blue cloth, with a wallet across his shoulder containing his homely dinner, "un gros morcean de pain noir meli de seigle, un fromage de chlvre, gros et dur comme un caillou" Nothing could be more charming than his description of the little goat-herd's day among the mountains, which is full of all those lights and shadows of sentiment, those aerial graces of mist and distance, with which his diffuse poetical narrative is always laden, yet never loses its connection with the central figure, the barefooted boy among his village comrades—patricianborn if almost peasant-bred, with the faroff fragrance of a splendid court hanging about the room to which he returns of nights, though the plaster is here and there broken on the walls, and the cracked tiles are innocent of any carpet. This mixture of poetic grace and romance with many sordid surroundings, the junction of high breeding and ancient race, and that delicate sense of noblesse which often gives so much charm to the character, with absolute poverty and privation, endured with smiling content, and even enjoyed, is always delightful to the sympathetic looker-on.
The reader who has followed Lamartine through the "Confidences" and "Nouvelles Confidences" out of which, unfortunately, he was always attempting to make more books and mote money, may perhaps tire of the often-repeated description, the details so often begun da capo, the minute but always most loving touches by which he renews the portraiture of his home. For ourselves, we avow we can swallow a great deal of this without murmur or objection; and we could Scarcely suggest a more perfect if tranquil* pleasure to those unacquainted with or forgetful of Lamartine's history, than may be found in the handsome and not too long volume—a mere piece of bookmaking, the harsh critic may say, the old recollections served up again—which, under the title of " Mimoires InSdites" has been published since his death;—or the companion book which he called "Le Manuscrit de ma Mère" and himself published not long before the end of his life. The critic and the social philosopher may judge hardly such revelations to the public of the secrets of family life, but we doubt whether the profanation is ii} any way sufficient to counterbalance the advantages of so true and close and intimate a history. Whatever degree of genius may be allowed to him in his own field of poetry, no admirer will ever claim for Lamartine the glory of dramatic power. He is religious, descriptive, sentimental, tender, with a fine if vague sense of natural beauty; but he is never in the smallest degree dramatic. What nature, however, has not given him, memory and love have almost supplied; and the picture of Milly, and of the beautiful and tender woman who forms its centre, is such as few poets have been able to invent for us. We speak sometimes with a suppressed sneer of the Frenchman's ideal, the ma 7nere of a sentiment which it is so easy to stigmatize as sentimentality. But such a figure as that of Madame de Lamartine, as exhibited to us in her own journal, as well as through her son's half-adoring sketches, is one which no lover of humanity would be content to let go. Simple but thoughtful—not intellectual, as we use the word; full of prejudices, no doubt—the prejudices of rank, though her actual position was scarcely above that of a farmer's homely wife; beautiful in thought and feeling as well as in person—always refined, yet always natural,—it is more easy to fall into panegyric of such a woman than to judge her coldly. In every scene of her life she is set before us with a tender fulness of detail. We see her thanking God with overflowing heart for the unhoped-for happiness which she enjoys in her rude and poor home, with no society but that of the peasants of the village—she, a great lady, ​born in St. Cloud, and brought up the playfellow of princes; getting dejected when the hail dashes down, sweeping the year's revenue of young grapes off the vines, yet blaming herself for her want of trust in Providence; driving back all alone and sad, crying under her veil, when she has taken her boy to school, but glad he had not seen her go to revive his childish trouble; then at a later period lamenting with a real distress which looks whimsica ' enough to our eyes, and asking herself how, if they retire altogether to Milly as her husband thinks expedient, abandoning the lodging in Macon, she is to marry her girls? yet weeping with heart-breaking sympathy over the poor young fellow who loves Suzanne, and whom the uncles and aunts reject as not rich enough. The mother cries over him, though Suzanne does not mind very much. She grows old quietly before us, and plunges into the more serious cares which rise round a mother, after the sweet anxieties of her children's early days are over— and lies awake at nights, wondering with aching heart how her boy is to be extricated from his difficulties, his debts paid, his marriage brought about, and the young Englishwoman secured for him on whom he has set his heart; nay, even with a tender superfluity of love when she has read his verses, this dear lady hurries off to a bit of naked wall somewhere, to plant ivy with her own hands—"pour que mon fils ne mentjt pas meme dans ses vers, qtiand il decrivit Milly dans ses harmonies." The last glimpse we have of her is perhaps the most touching of all—when she goes back at sixty to the allee, in the homely garden, where it was her daily habit to retire for thought every twilight in the happy days when she was so poor and her children young; and where all alone she can scarcely keep herself from gazing " la-bas sous les tilleuls pour voir si je tfy aperceyrai pas les robes blanches de mes petites." This delightful picture, so womanly, so mother-like, so exquisite in all its soft details, is finer than all the many "Harmonies" which Lamartine gave to the world,—it is the best poem he has left behind him.
It was thus, among so many homely surroundings, that the little barefooted goatherd of Milly, proud young Burgundian gentilhomme, heir of many substantial terres, and much family pride and prestige, grew and matured on his native soil. The contrast and the mixture of lowliness and loftiness is such as we can scarcely conceive of in England, and it is very captivating to the imagination. During the brief preliminary reign of Louis XVIII., which ended in ignominious flight, when Napoleon escaped from Elba, the young Lamartine was taken by his father to court, like a true young hero of romance, and there presented to the old friends from whom the chevalier would ask nothing for himself, but to whom he commended his son, enrolling him in the king's body-guard. The brilliant and beautiful young garde du corps made, according to his own account, a sensation at court, where he shows himself to us, led by his handsome old patrician father, in all the bloom of his youth, and in all the enthusiasm of long-dormant loyalty, exactly as one of our favourite heroes appears in a novel. This did not, however, last long; but, short as was the period of his service, it was too long for the young poet, who mourns piteously over his hard fate in his jouthf ul letters. " Che crea aveva fatto io al cielo per devenir una?nacchina militare f " he cries, with comical despair, to one of his correspondents. But he did not continue a military machine. The return of the Bourbons did not tempt him to resume his musket, and he soon began to fix his hopes upon diplomacy. For a few years afterwards his course was erratic enough. He wandered hither and thither, from Milly fo Macon, or to one of the houses of his uncles in the neighbourhood, to his friends at Nice, the De Maistre family, or, above all, to Chamb<Sry, where he found his English bride. There were many difficulties in the way of obtaining employment for him, and in arranging his marriage, to which his family, on the one hand, and the lady's mother on the other, had decided objections. Though he speaks throughout his "Confidences" of this marriage in very lover-like terms, it is amusing to find the matter-of-fact prudence wifh which he discusses the subject at the moment when it was for htm the most important of businesses. In one of the letters of this period, published since his death, we find him asking the good offices of his correspondent to discover for him, through means of friends she had in London, the particulars of the young Englishwoman's fortune, and veri- fication of her pretensions. It was a good v match, and " en fait de bons partis la cSleriti est d^une haute importance" he says, with comical good faith and seriousness. During the time of his uncertainty, when he waited in expectation of a letter from Paris, announcing an appointment worthy his acceptance on one hand, and for ​the consent of the parents on both sides to his marriage on the other, the young poet had his cares and troubles, and suffered much from the doubt, the suspense,, and the vague unhappiness which they bring. He kept himself alive and moderately cheerful, however, by " Meditations^ which passed from one hand to another; and while read by the young men of the day in studios and barracks, and by ladies in many a dainty boudoir, prepared for him a certain melancholy but elevated reputation, for the moment among private friends only, but ready to burst forth in all the explosive enthusiasm of youth, so soon as these delicate and visionary strophes should be given to the world. It is scarcely possible to overestimate the importance of this mode of preparing the public mind for a new fame. We have in our own time seen instances in which it has triumphed over many disadvantages, and secured a most superior and inteltectual audience, proud of their own discovery of a man of genius before he manifested himself to the world.
At last fortune favoured the poet, raining all her gifts upon him at once. In the year 1820, when he was nearly thirty, after years of suspense, his friends at Paris procured for him an appointment as secretary to the French embassy at Naples, and at the same moment the obstacles in the way of his marriage were happily overcome, and he left France in haste for his new duties, carrying with him his bride. At precisely the same time, the day before his departure, his first volume of "Meditations" saw the light. All the things he had desired were thus showered upon him at once. So far as our purpose is concerned, the publication of his first volume was the most momentous of these three incidents. His diplomatic career lasted only until 1830, and was not of profound importance in his history; and his marriage, though apparently happy and prosperous, calls for no particular notice here; but his poems made the young man, about whom many people were already interested and curious, at once into a notability, and gained him a place in the heart of his nation, then in all the fervour of a new tide of intellectual life. The empire, with all its victories, following close upon the Revolution with all its terrors, had not only diverted the mind, and for the moment arrested the literature of France, but had given that much-tried country so much to do, so many excitements of a more violent kind, that poetry had found little possibility of a quiet hearing. Such few voices as had pressed through the tumult were not of a kind to make a very profound impression, and they were chiefly listened to at all as expressing the sentiment of the moment. The prison songs of Andr£ Ch&iier, the emigrant's song of Chllteaubriand, bring before us*rather a painful sense 01 the circumstances that inspired them than any thrill of poetical enthusiasm; and the one wild utterance of the Revolution age, the fiery strain composed on one fierce note, of Rouget de PIsle, is still more emphatically the creation, as it became the inspiration, of passionate popular feeling—a war-cry rather than a poem. The Bourbons, however unwelcome their reign or unsatisfactory their principles in a political point of view, did France the good service of bringing back the ordinary after the fiery and long-continued reign of the extraordinary. The natural conditions of life returned, bringing with them the intellectual energy and literary art for which France has always been distinguished. The reader is aware how great an outburst of new life in this channel distinguished the first half of this century. The revival affected not only the producers of literature but its audience. Not only was the voice emancipated and the pen, but the ear of the listener, so long deafened with echoes of battle, grew eager for the softer sounds, the more attractive harmonies, the varied and human voices of peace.
And perhaps the very extravagance and violence of the past age gave a deeper charm to the sentimental sweetness, the tranquil tone of feeling, the woods and hills and valleys, the mists and aerial perspectives of poetry such as Lamartine's. In the reaction from a violently practical influence such as forces the mind to deal with things rather than thoughts, sentiment has perhaps its best opportunity, just as the retired warrior becomes the gentlest of neighbours, the most placid and patient of cultivators, replacing campaigns by cabbages, after the model of Cincinnatus, with an ease and content which is much less easy to attain to after the excitement, the wear and tear of other professions. France, accordingly, always accessible on that side of her mind, so to speak, and weary of excitement, took hold with genuine affection and interest of the young Burgundian. That was one of the moments, so often recurring, when all the world was young, and when the entire generation awoke to a sense of its intellectual privileges and superiority as one man, feeling within itself the power to do ​something more than had ever yet been done, and welcoming new poets, new romancists, even new historians and philosophers, as demigods come for the salvation of the world. Perhaps our worst quality now is, not so much that genius is wanting as that we have lost this universal spring of youthfulness, and are, though we suppose there is the same proportion of young minds as usual, a middle-aged period. In Englanc we have had no fit of intellectual youthfulness and eagerness since the days when Wordsworth, and Coleridge, and Scott, and Byron were in full song amongst us. Neither has France been young since the period when Victor Hugo and Lamartine began their career. They had this unspeakable advantage in their favour. The enthusiasm of their generation warmed and inspired them; they felt their foreheads strike against the skies, and believed in the aureole of stars which every worshipper attributed to them. It seems very likely, according to all evidence, that poetry requires this sublime self-confidence either supernaturally sustained from within, as in the case of Wordsworth—or fed by enthusiasm from without, as with the Frenchman. Lamartine probably drew this support of the poetic soul from both sources; but that he had the most flattering reception from the public d' elite which he specially addressed, there seems to be no manner of doubt.
He left Paris, he tells, on the day after his book was published, partly moved no doubt by necessity, but partly one feels sure by a trick of that amusing and openhearted vanity which a Frenchman makes no such attempt as an Englishman would do to conceal. " The only tidings," he says, " of my fate which I received was a word from M. Gosselin [his publisher] on the morning of my departure, announcing that his office was thronged by a crowd of the best classes in search of copies; and a note from the oracle the Prince de Talleyrand to his friend the sister of the famous prince Poniatowsky, which she forwarded to me at eight o'clock in the morning, and in which the great diplomatist informed her that he had spent the whole night in reading me, and that at last the soul had its poet." "Tame avait enfin son po 'ete!" what praise more delightful could be breathed into the ear of the young sentimentalist! " Je n'aspirais pas au genie, V&me?ne suffisait: " he adds, with much attendrissement and rapture as may be imagined, " tous ntes pauvres vers tfetaient que des soupirs,"
The character of these " Meditations," "Harmonies? " Recueillements? the appropriate names which he gives to his various collections of poems, may be gleaned at once by their titles. It is somewhat difficult to follow through many editions which have changed the arrangement and succession of the different poems, the actual verses which first saw the day; but they are all so similar in character that we cannot do the poet wrong by instancing at hazard the first that catch the eye. "Benediction de Dieu dans la Solitude." "Hymne du Soir dans les Temples," "Pensée des Morts," "L'Infini dans les Cieux," "Hymne de la Douleur," "Jéhovah; ou l'idée de Dieu,"—so run the strains. Vague piety of an elevated but very general kind, vague sentiment, melancholy, and sadness; vague descriptions of landscape, of rivers, of the sun, the sky, and the mountains,—are to be found in all, always gracefully, often melodiously expressed—sometimes resounding with the accumulation of epithets which suits declamation better than poetry; sometimes dropping into a murmurous sweet monotony, which, barring that the effort is produced by words instead of notes, resembles more (we are conscious of the apparent bull) a song without words than a succession of articulate verses. It is impossible to discover in them much thought; but they are profoundly and tenderly reflective, and express what is recognized as thought by the majority of ordinary- readers. Reflective, retrospective, full of the gentle sadness which is produced by recollections which are melancholy without being bitter—by the memory of the distant dead, whose loss has ceased to be a weighty and present grief—and by that consciousness of the transitory character of life, and peace, and happiness, and everything that man esteems, which is not pressed close by immediate neglect or dismay. They are of the class of poetry which delights youth at that stage when it loves to be made sad, and which affords to women and lonely persons a means of expressing the vague and causeless despondencies of a silent existence.
This is not the highest aim of poetry, but we are not sure that it is not one of its most beneficial uses. The active mind and passionate soul have need of stronger fare; but so long as human nature is framed as it is, the majority must always be subject to the languors and undefined dissatisfactions which result from nothing tangible in our lives, but are the very breath of a higher being—the proofs of ​an obscured divinity of origin which interferes with the content and comfort of the race more, perhaps, than they heighten its enjoyments. The " thoughts which lie too deep for tears " of Wordsworth, are too profound, too broad for the musing melancholy which invades so many gentle souls in times of loneliness—in those moments when there is nothing positive to complain of, but life runs low, and everything is obscured with veils and mists of melancholy. To such a mood the poetic strain which breathes softly but sadly the universal despondencies of earth—generalizing its less weighty miseries into one vague plaint, sweet and always soft like the waves on the beach when the sea is calm, and only a reminiscence of past storm is- in the measured break and ripple — is beyond description welcome. The surcharged heart, heavy with it knows not what, finds relief. It finds brotherhood, sympathy, comprehension—it even feels in its own languors, its own gentle discontent, a trace of something sublime—a superiority to the common mass which is, in itself, infinitely consoling. We have but little poetry in England which takes the same place with the same dignity. "Pleasures of Memory," and "Pleasures of Hope," and "Pleasures of Imagination," have all dropped out of recollection, though possibly in their day they filled this place, and supplied this perennial want of the mind. But Lamartine does it with more variety, with more dignity, and absolute certainty that this is the true use of poetry. And so far he is right. It is, if not its single and absolute end, at least one of its most serviceable uses. And the audience to which such a poet appeals is more numerous and perhaps more important than any other. He misses the highest and the lowest, whose tastes curiously enough often agree—the lower level requiring for excitement those lofty and primitive passions which the highest finds its enjoyment in, because they are the highest impulses of which humanity is capable. But all the vast mass of the middle, the centre of humanity, the hearts that feel without having any necessity to penetrate to the depths of feeling; the minds which think without being impelled much beyond the surface; the gentle and sensible (to use that word in its French, not its English, meaning) intelligences, which are open to all poetic influences not too high for them—taking the highest indeed on trust, because they are told to do so, but finding a real and refined enjoyment in the poetry of reflection and sentiment which is in within their personal grasp,—is his natural kingdom. This is the world which Lamartine addressed, and where he was received with cordial yet tearful acclamations; he was "le po'ete de Vame" Could there be for his audience any description more pouching, or more adapted to penetrate directly to the heart? That Talleyrand should be the author of this title is one of the quaintest of circumstances. The reader might perhaps be tempted to ask whether he had a soul at all, that cleverest of all possible diplomatists. But Lamartine does not seem to have been troubled by any such doubt; indeed it is wonderful to see with what ease the mind accepts the oracular sentence of a man who acknowledges its own excellences, and predicts* its success, "Call me wise, and I will allow you to be a judge" (of wisdom), says a clever Scotch proverb. The poet, in this instance, seems to have been moved by a very natural feeling to the point of describing his first great applauder as an "oracle." In all these volumes, however, full as they are of the personality of the writer, and of his private recollections and moods of mind, there is no attempt to embody in any living type of character his theories of existence, or such counsel as he had to bestow upon his poetical audie'nee. So far as he had a hero at all, Lamartine was his own hero. The dramatic faculty is almost altogether wanting in him. Before the period of his first volume, he had attempted a Biblical drama, bearing the title of "Saul," a fragment of which was afterwards published; and so far had he gone in this undertaking that he read the drama to the great actor Talma, hoping no less for it than admission to the classic stage of the Frangais. " Talma was full of enthusiasm for the poetry, the style, and the fine effects which result from the conception of the piece," he writes. "As I went on he twisted himself about in his easychair, and said, 'There is tragedy in this. It is astonishing. I should never have believed it!' He told me—and, better still, he allowed me to see—that the part of Saul tempted him greatly. He repeated to me a score of times that no lines so fine had ever been read to him; that I was a poet, and perhaps the only one existing; that the 4 Moise* of M. de Chateaubriand was fine, but that mine transcended it." This was very fine talk; but it did not open the difficult doors of the Frangais; and the young artist seems to have succumbed at once, and to have thought nothing more about it, with that ​extraordinary facility of youth which is set upon one thing to-day, and to-morrow has forgotten its very existence. If we may judge of "Saul" from the "Fragment Bibliqite? which we find in Lamartine's later volumes, it will be difficult to believe in Talma's admiration. This, as far as we can judge, was the only time that he attempted the drama. Even earlier, however, than "Saul," the incident which forms the groundwork of the tales of " Graziella" and "Raphael" had occurred in the young poet's own life; and nothing could have served the occasion better, or called forth his genius so well as the romance which no natural modesty prompted him to keep secret, in all its delightful mixture of reality and fiction—the "Dichtung und Wahrheit" of which a greater poet and mightier genius did not disdain the charm.
It is only just to Lamartine, however, to say that his graceful but languishing and sentimental tales are more prepossessing to the reader, and call forth in a much lesser degree the natural opposition which is roused in everybody's mind by highly-pitched egotism and vanity, than those of Goethe. "Graziella," in particular, is a beautiful little idyl, perfectly pure, picturesque, and touching. The Italian girl herself has something of the charm which we have already remarked in Lamartine's early sketches of his own childhood. She is represented in all the homely circumstances of her lot, without any attempt to make an impossible young lady out of the humble Procitana. This error, which is one into which English romancers continually fall, does not seem to affect the Frenchman, though whether this may be a consequence of the democratical atmosphere of his nation, or arises merely from his higher artistic susceptibility, it is difficult to tell. Whatever the cause may be, however, Graziella is as complete a fisher-girl as the little Lamartine was a goat-herd among his native hills. Neither her costume nor her habits of life are sacrificed to the elevation and refinement necessary to a heroine. To be sure^the costume of a fisher-lass from Procida is less objectionable in romance than the homely gown of an English country girl; but the plot ventures almost to the edge of ridicule when he represents his Graziella trying on the costume of civilization, and pinching her larger beauty into the French corsets and silk gown, which in her ignorance she thought likely to please him. Altogether this poetic little tale is, we think, the finest thing Lamartine has done. It is a portion of his "Confidences" he is the hero, the god of the little southern world, into which he threw himself with all the enthusiasm of youth. Of all his landscapes, except the home scenery of Milly, ther^ is none of which he has so taken* in the^peculiar and pervading charm. The sunny yet dangerous sea, the lovely isles, the hill-terraces, with their wonderful Elysian points of vision, the subtle sweetness of the air, the mingling of sky and water, with all their ineffable tones of light and colour, have been nowhere more perfectly represented; and if the passion and despair of the young Neapolitan may be excessive, they are made possible by her country, by the softening effects of that seductive air, and by the extreme youth of the heroine. Very different is the sickly and unnatural effect of the companion story "Raphael," the scene of which is laid in the town, and on the lake, of Aix in Savoy, and in which the sentimental passion of the two lovers becomes nauseous to the reader in its very commencement, and is infinitely more objectionable in its ostentatious purity than any ordinary tale of passion. The hero of " Graziella " is young and guileless, half unaware of, and more than half partaking the innocent frenzy he awakens; but Raphael is a miserable poor creature, good for nothing but to lie at his mistress's feet, to listen to her movements through the door that divides them, to rave about her perfections and his love. The sickly caresses—the long, silent raptures in which the two gaze into each other's eyes—the still more sickly ravings of their love, which has no pleasant beginning, no dramatic working up to^ wards a climax, but jumps into languishing completeness at once,— all breathe an unhealthy, artificial, enervating atmosphere, pernicious to the last degree for any young mind which could be charmed by it, and not far from disgusting to the maturer reader. In both these productions, the poet, as we have said, is his own hero. The incidents are professedly true; and the author gives himself credit throughout his autobiographical works for having passed through all the tumults and agitations of these exhibitions of wouldbe passion. We say would-be, for there is not in reality any passion in them. Nothing of the fiery directness of overwhelming emotion is in either narrative. "Raphael," in particular, is slowly piled up with a leisurely gloating over the mental fondnesses and fine sentiments of the languishing pair, which stops all feeling ​of indulgence; and when the sentimental lover, wrapped up in thoughts of his Julia, accepts from his mother the price of her trees, and hurries away, under pretence of sickness, to Aix, to indulge his maudlin passion by another meeting, the reader loses all patience with so miserable a hero. But to the poet it seems quite reasonable and natural, not to say angelic, of the mother to make any sacrifice to satisfy the necessities of her son's heart, and quite consistent with the son's honour and poetic nobility of soul to leave all the duties of life behind him, and moon his life away dancing attendance^ upon his sickly love, " collant ses levres a ses beaux pieds? and raving and being raved at with weak and wordy adoration.
In the other narratives of the "Confidences" such, for instance, as the tale called "Fior d'Aliza," the poet is not the hero but the sympathizing friend of the chief sufferers, with some gain in point of modesty, but not much in point of art All for love, in a sense which goes altogether beyond our robuster meaning, is his perpetual motto. The world appears to him only as a place in which two young persons may bill and coo, turning all its beautiful and noble scenery into a succession of nests for the inevitable turtledoves. In all this, let us do him justice, there is nothing licentious or immoral. When there may happen to occur a love which cannot end in marriage, it is almost ostentatiously demonstrated to be a union of the heart only; and it is on the whole a pure idyl which Lamartine loves. The most that can be said of him is, that he indulges freely in the amiable indecency, chiefly concerned with babies and their mothers, which Continental manners permit and authorize. He is fond of nursery exhibitions, of sucklings and their play; but only the prudish English taste perhaps will object to this, such improprieties being considered in other regions virtuous, nay, religious. This defect and an undue exhibition of the delights of wedded and lawful love, are almost all the moral sins of which we can accuse him; and there are even among ourselves, no doubt, a host of virtuous critics to whom the fact of wedlock makes everything correct and legitimate. This is not the kind of weakness, however, which we naturally expect from a Frenchman.
The kindred works written in verse instead of in poetical prose, which are of congenial character to the tales of the "Confidences" cannot be said to add much to Lamartine's reputation. The story of "Jocelyn? the best known of these larger works, is one prolonged meditation interspersed with a few incidents, rather than a dramatic poem, though the tale it tells has chances strange enough to bring out character, had the vague young hero possessed ai$r. The story is supposed to be taken from a manuscript found in the house of a village cure after his death, and was in reality, we are informed, an account of the actual adventures of a parish priest well known to the poet. The habit of founding works of art upon incidents of real life is an almost infallible sign of a second-rate genius, though it is an expedient which all the world loves to attribute to every imaginative writer. Following this very commonplace suggestion, Lamartine constantly takes credit to himself for being merely the narrator of actual events, with what truth we are unable to decide. The very name of the cure thus plucked out of his privacy and made into a poem is, we think, indicated in the "Confidences. 7 ' Such an effort, however, to make fact stand in the place of art, is seldom successful; and that man would be wise indeed who could discern any individual features in the colourless apparition of Jocelyn. He is a type of generosity, love, self-sacrifice, and impressionable feeling, but not in the smallest degree a recognizable man. The poet, in a, postscriptum which now prefaces the work, denies the imputation of having intended to write "a plea against the celibacy of the clergy, an attack upon religion." The idea of making, as he says, "of a poem a controversy in verse, for or against any question of discipline," had, he declares, never entered his head; though it cannot be denied that the accusation seems justified, at least by the character of the tale. The young Jocelyn, overhearing the lamentations of his mother—such lamentations as no doubt Lamartine heard not unf requently at home—over the defective dot which kept her daughter from marrying, makes an instant sacrifice of his own dawning youth and aspirations, and dedicates himself to the priesthood in order thus to endow his sister with the entire possessions of the family. No idea that this was anything but a perfectly noble and manly act crosses the .mind of either poet or hero. We then follow him to the seminary, where, with much painful repression of his feelings, he goes through his preliminary studies. These, however, are interrupted by the Revolution; his home is broken up, and he himself, hunted ​to the hills, finds refuge in a cavern from the pursuit of his enemies. Here he ministers to another less happy refugee, who dies in his arms, leaving to his charge a stripling called the son, but in reality the daughter of the dead man, Laurence, who succeeds for a long time in deceiving her sole protector in respect to her sex. From the moment of her appearance thus, his cave becomes dear and beautiful to the young student, who, without knowing why, is immediately transported into the mysterious happiness of a first love. After he discovers her secret, the young man realizes the meaning of this new world in which he feels himself to be living, and for two years the lovers live an idyllic life of purity yet mutual fondness, adoring each other with all the frankness of youth, yet living like a pair of angels in their cave. This happiness is interrupted by a sudden appeal from the peasant who has all along protected Jocelyn, calling him to visit in prison a banished bishop on the very eve of the guillotine. Tearing himself from the side of his love at the bidding of duty, the young man goes reluctantly down the mountain-side to the prison at Grenoble to visit his bishop. Here, however, he meets with a trial so immense that flesh and blood is incapable of supporting it. The bishop, dying, insists on making the unhappy neophyte a priest, in order that he himself may be enabled to confess and to leave the world with all the sacraments of the Church. Jocelyn, remembering his love, resists. He does all that he can to escape from this terrible dilemma, but in vain; and at last finds himself with despair receiving the undesired consecration, which makes Laurence henceforth impossible to him. The tremendous interview they have at the top of their hill and on the threshold of their cave before they part forever, is the climax of the story. Jocelyn returns in moody anguish to his seminary. No consciousness of having done well, no hope of reconciling himself to the dreary future, supports him. In losing Laurence he loses everything. The next and only remaining change in his life is his transfer from the seminary to the mountain parish of Valneige, where he spends the rest of his days in the depths of poverty, goodness, and self-absorption. Here, as in the first awakening of his unsuspected love for Laurence, which he supposes to be affectionate friendship for a boy confided to his care, there are charming touches of natural feeling, and of that rural life which is the truest thing in Lamartine's experience. But neither the occupations of his profession and the interests of the little rural community round him, nor the calming influences of time, do anything for Jocelyn; and his melancholy existence culminates when he is hastily sent for to see a dying traveller in a neighboring village, and there finds his lost love, whose confession he receives, and to whom he administers the last sacraments. When he has buried Laurence, he has no more to do in life, and dies in his humble presbytère, leaving behind him the sentimental record long drawn out of balked love, and wasted life, and melancholy beyond all hope.
Such is the story, weak, sweet, maudlin, and superhuman. It caught the public attention forcibly, we are told, at the moment of its production, and has attained a more or less secure place among French classics. "'Jocelyn' is the one of my works," Lamartine himself tells us, "which has procured for me the most intimate and numerous communications with unknown persons of all ages and countries." Notwithstanding, however, this popular testimony, it is almost impossible to imagine anything more hectic and unnatural, more opposed to the conditions of practicable existence, than this long monologue, this song; upon one note. There have been poetical heroes before now to whom love has been the one thing worth living for; and, indeed, a visionary passion balked of all fulfilment has taken a larger place in poetry than perhaps any other manifestation of human feeling. It is the very soul, for instance, of the noble poetry of Italy; but we need not say how different is the poor and false ideal afforded us in "Jocelyn" from anything that could be suggested even by the shadow of that high and inspiring passion. Lamartine's hero is as incapable of thinking of anything else, or of rising above his immediate personal recollections and hankerings for the thing forbidden, as he is of resisting the pressure of circumstances which steal his happiness from him. He has neither manhood enough to face the raving and cursing ecclesiastic in his prison and preserve his liberty, nor, when that liberty is gone, to accept the consequences. Neither the strength to hold fast, nor the strength to v give up, is in him. Such a frail and weak character is a favourite of fiction, where all its vacillations do excellent service in bringing out the varying shades of human weakness; but this does not seem to have been in the slightest degree Lamartine's, intention. On the contrary, it is an ideal ​figure which he means to set before us, a being superior to the common rules of humanity, a saint and martyr, the very emblem and impersonation of poetical self-sacrifice. We cannot find a line to show that the poet himself felt anything to be wanting in the type he chooses of perfect love and suffering; and though the reader is more impatient than sympathetic, the writer has always the air of being perfectly satisfied with his own creation, and convinced that he has set forth in it a high and most attractive ideal Laurence is still more shadowy than her priest-lover; and but for the intense happiness which we are told she is capable of conferring by her presence, her looks, and her caresses, is the mere symbol of a woman without any character at all. In short, the reader feels that this ideal pair are very badly used by their Maker, who makes them suffer an infinity of vague torture without any compensation for it, any sense of duty to support them, any nobility of resignation to reconcile their lives to ordinary existence. What is called self-renunciation thus becomes a mere forced and involuntary endurance, against which they struggle all their lives: while the happiness to which they aspire is degraded into a monotonous rapture of touch and clasp and caress; not passion, but maudlin fondness; not despair, but maudlin lamentations over what they would but cannot possess.
The second poem which the author, with some vague plan in his head, of which he does not reveal the fin mot, meant to form part of a series of which "Jocelyn" was the first—also finds its centre of interest in the same blazing, hot love which is the only power worth noticing in the universe, according to Lamartine. We do not pretend to say what the connection between the two may be. At first glance we might suppose that one of them represents that "love which never had an earthly close," which is always so captivating to the imagination—and the other, love satisfied and triumphant forcing its way through all obstacles. This transparent contrast and connection, however, is destroyed by the fact that the "Chute d'un Ange" closes in still more dismal despair and misery than anything that happens to Jocelyn; and that the muddle of torture, like the muddle of bliss, comes about apparently without any moral cause whatever, from circumstances over which neither the poet nor his hero has any control. What moral meaning there is in it, or rather is intended to be in it, is beyond our power to discover. It is a puzzle upon which the ingenuity of some critic at leisure might occupy itself, were the question worth the trouble. The story is, however, solemnly introduced to us as coming from the lips of a prophet-hermit of Lebanon, who dies as soon as he has accomplished the recital. The angel whose fall is the subject of the tale belongs to those primitive times when the sons of God made alliances with the daughters of men, at the curious cost, according to Lamartine, of living nine lives (an unlucky number) upon earth before they could once more attain their native heaven. The treatment of the fallen angel is original at least, if nothing more. When he drops suddenly into manhood, moved by the hot and generous purpose of saving his human love (who knows nothing of him) from the hands of giants, he brings with him no reminiscences of his better state, no traditions of heaven or heavenly knowledge, but becomes a salvage man, without even the power of speech, knowing nothing about himself, and unable to communicate with the primitive people about him. This transformation is so complete, that even when taught by Daïdha, the object of his affections, to speak, and raised by his love for her to a certain humanity, no sort of recollection ever seems to come back to him; and the only purpose for which he is brought upon this earth seems again to be mere billing and cooing, accomplished under the most tragic risks, and with hideous interruptions of suffering, over which the couple, increased by the addition of twin babies of portentous appetite, have many extraordinary triumphs, emerging again constantly on the other side of the cloud into a sickly paradise of embraces, sucklings, and such-like conjugal and nursery blisses. What is meant by the very earthly Olympus of primeval giant gods into which they are carried, or by the final mysterious conclusion in the desert, when Daïdha dies cursing, for the death of her children, the husband who has resigned heaven for her, we are unable to tell; neither can we feel that this climax demonstrates the emptiness of human good as shown in the desolate ending as much of the happy and fortunate as of the disappointed lover, though probably this is what the poet meant. The angel-father breaks into blasphemy when he sees his edifice of happiness fall to pieces around him, and makes a last pyrotechnic effort to consume himself along with his dead wife and children; but even when he comes to this conclusion, nothing beyond ​despair at the loss of his happiness seems to enter his mind—he has no consciousness of his voluntary descent into mortality—no apparent knowledge of himself as being more than a man. The whole effect is manqiiihy this curious failure on the part of the poet even to identify his own conception: he would seem either to have forgotten it altogether, or to have felt himself unable to grasp the idea of a loftier nature than that of humanity, or to think of an angel as anything beyond the handsome youth with flowing hair which painters have taken as the type of heavenly existence. Thus, once more, everything that is desirable in life comes to be represented by kisses and languishing looks, by the mutual self-absorption of two beings, who find a somewhat monotonous heaven in each other's arms, and around whom the world may tremble or be convulsed, and all the race of man disappear, without even awakening them from their private raptures. All this, however, let the reader remember, is combined with the most perfect virtue. It is connubiality rendered improper, and domesticity made indecent; but there is no idea of evil in the whole matter; it is virtue, only too sweet, too fond, too loving—maudlin and nasty if you please, but virtue all the same.
We are glad to be able to retire out of this sickly sweetness to the better atmosphere of the fugitive poems, those meditations and harmonies, which, if never reaching the highest level of poetry, are still expressive of many of the gentler feelings of the heart, its languors and sadness, its tender recollections, and that vague melancholy which, there can be little doubt, gives so much of its charm to nature. In this point of view, as a reflective and descriptive poet, giving a harmonious medium of expression to many a gentle, voiceless soul, Lamartine will probably long retain his place in the estimation of his countrymen. His longer poems are, we trust, as dead by this time as they deserve to be, and we feel a personal necessity to remove the sickly odour which they leave behind them by one more return to the native soil which gave him strength, and filled him with an inspiration more wholesome and sweet than sentiment. Here is Milly once more, the beloved home, with all its gentle habits and daily life—but this time in melodious verse, which we venture to put into a very literal English version:—
Then come in turn the many cares of day— To reap the fields, the gathered grain to lay On the heaped carts, before the rain-cloud rent By sudden lightning from its gloom has sent Quick-failing floods to swell the ripened ear, Or stain with white decay its golden cheer; Gather the fruit that falls from trees bereft; Call back the bees to homes this morning left The laden branch weighed down with wealth sustain; Clear the choked runlet from its sandy stain. Then tend the poor, who, stretching empty hands, Asking for pence or bread in God's name stands; Or widow, who, from souls untouched by fears, Alms of the heart, asks tears to swell her tears; Or hopeful counsel on the unthrifty shed, Give orphan work, and to the sick a bed: Then 'neath the trees at noon a pause is made— Masters and servants, talking in the shade Of wind that rises, of bright skies that pale, Of the thick clouds that fall in whitening hail, The boughs by caterpillars eaten black, The ragged brier that tears the scythe's edge back. Then come the children: 'midst them, in her place, The mother teaches of God's name and grace; Or half-spelt words are murmured, homelier lore, Or numbers, finger-counted o'er and o'er; Or trains them, thread from lint or wool to win, Or weave their garments from the thread they spin.
Thus toil on toil from hour to hour goes on, Till gently, lo! the working-time is done: The full day softly falls; eve comes, and we Beside the door sit on the fallen tree, And watch the great wain heaped with odorous grass, The gleaners following where its slow wheels pass; The herdsman leading back from field and wood The heavy-uddered goats; in grateful mood, Charged with the gifts the kindly vale bestowed, The beggar passing bowed beneath his load. Behind the hill, in mists of gold, the sun With love we watch go down, his journey done; And as his great round, dropping, drowned in shade, Broideries of gold or sombre furrows made, We fix the fortunes of the coming morn, If to dim skies or radiant brightness born. Thus to the Christian eye life's darkening eve Promise of bright days after death can give. The angelus sounds soft when fails the light, Convoking spirits blest to bless the night. All darkens with the sky: the soul is still, The memories of the dead come back at will;
We think of friends whose eyes have long foregone In the eternal day both moon and sun. With sadness in our hearts' still depths we trace Whence they have gone, the ever-empty place; And to fill up the void o'er which we grieve, A sigh, a tear, within its depths we leave.
At length when stars are trembling overhead, Returning to our hearth we talk, we read,— One of those legacies sublime and dear By the great dead left to their followers here— Men who like lights across the ages shine,— Homer or Fenélon; or, more divine, That book where secrets all of earth and heaven In two great words—hope! charity!—are given. And sometimes, too, to make the night more sweet, The darkness bright with song, our lips repeat Verses of some great singer that could win Their charmed tones from lutes of seraphim, Decking dear truth with numbers sweet, and words And image such as nature's self affords.
But slumber, gentle issue of toil's sighs, Before the hour weighs down our weary eyes; And, as 'twas wont in Rachel's primal days, The household gathers for the evening praise. To make more pure, more sweet the worship given, A child's voice rises with our prayers to heaven— Virginal voice touched to a tenderer tone By presence of that God with whom alone It pleads, invoking blessing on the night; Then in a song of Zion rising- light To which is choral answer; gentle note Of mother—from the father's manly throat A deeper sound; old voices shrill and spare, And shepherds' rough from strife of wind and air, With heavy burden hum the chant divine, And with the leading voice, clear, infantine, Contrast like trouble and serenity— An hour of peace within a stormy day— Till you would say, as voice on voices broke, Mortals who questioned while an angel spoke.
This is finely touched, and with real tenderness of feeling. It is part of the poem entitled "Bénédiction de Dieu dans la Solitude" and was suggested, the poet tells us, by a pretty group formed of his mother, his young wife, her mother and her child, seated in a summer landscape close to the old house which had sheltered his infancy. In this kind of gentle strain, whether it be prose or poetry, he is beyond rivalry. When all other inspiration fails, the inspiration of home never fails him. Whatever he may be elsewhere, at Milly he is ever a true poet. This is the highest praise we can give to Lamartine. His longer poems are monotonous and cloying; his poetical romances of a mawkish and unwholesome sweetness. But on his native soil, in the homely house of his mother, all objectionable qualities disappear. He loves the skies which overarch that dear bit of country; he loves the hills and the fields because they surround that centre of all associations; and in his companionship with nature he is always tender and natural, seldom exaggerated, and scarcely ever morbid. His shorter strains are full of the fresh atmosphere of the country he loved; and the sentiment of pensive evenings and still nights, soft-breathing, full of stars and darkness, is to be found everywhere in the gentle melodious verse; not lofty or all-absorbing like the nature-worship of Wordsworth, but more within the range of the ordinary mind, and quite as genuine and true. Had he been content with this, and not aspired to represent passion of which he knew nothing, his fame would have been more real and more lasting. He was such a poet as the quieter intellectualist, the pensive thinker loves. He could not touch the greater springs of human feeling; but he could so play upon the milder stops of that great instinct as to fill his audience with a soft enthusiasm. Some of his prose works reach to a profounder influence; and those readers who remember, when it came out, the "History of the Girondists," will not refuse to the poet a certain power of moving and exciting the mind: but this work and the many others which preceded and followed it, have little to do with our argument. They are poetical and exaggerated prose, and have no claim to the higher title of poetry.
In the midst of his manifold productions, however, there happened to Lamartine such a chance as befalls few poets. He had it in his power once in his life to do something greater than the greatest lyric, more noble than any vers. At the crisis of the Revolution of 1848, chance (to use the word without irreverence) thrust him and no other into the place of master, and held him for one supreme moment alone between France and anarchy—between, we might almost say, the world and a second terrible Revolution. And there the sentimentalist proved himself a man; he confronted raving Paris, and subdued it. The old noble French blood in his veins rose to the greatness of the crisis. With a pardonable thrill of pride in the position, so strange to a writer and man of thought, into which ​without any action of his own he found himself forced, he describes how he faced the tremendous mob of Paris for seventy hours, almost without repose, without sleep or food, when there was no other man in France bold enough or wise enough to take that supreme part; and ended by guiding that most aimless of revolutions to a peaceful conclusion, for the moment at least It was not Lamartine's fault that the empire came after him. Long before the day of the empire had come he had fallen from his momentary elevation, and lost all influence over his country. But his downfall cannot efface the fact that he did actually reign, and reign beneficently, subduing and controlling the excited nation, saving men's lives and the balance of society. We know no other poet who has had such a chance afforded him, and few men who have acquitted themselves so well in one of the most difficult and dangerous positions which it is possible for a man to hold.
The end of his life, which was spent obscurely, faded away amid many clouds; and it is better that we should not attempt to enter into that record of perpetual debt and shifting impecuniosity. The nation itself came, we think more than once, to the rescue of the poet; and he went on until his very end publishing and republishing, following reminiscence with reminiscence, in a feverish strain for money, which it is painful to contemplate. The causes of this we need not enter into; but, well endowed as his family had left him, sole heir of all the uncles and aunts who had sat heavily upon his early life, he died poor and deprived of almost everything. When a man has to come pitifully before the world and explain how, to retain Milly, he sells another bit of himself, another volume of "Confidences" to the eager bookseller—making, one feels, capital of the very sympathy excited—the situation is too painful and humbling to be dwelt upon. Lamartine's sun went down amid those clouds. But the man is dead, and his generation are disappearing off the scene, and France has perhaps more debts to him than she has ever been able to pay. He never led her intentionally astray, from one end of his career to the other. If his adoration of love is sometimes sickly, and his sentimentality maudlin, and the ideal world he framed a narrow and poor world, filled with but one monotonous strain of weak passion—it is at the same time a pure love which he idolizes, a virtuous ideal, which, according to his lights, he endeavours to set forth. And in his fugitive pieces there dwells often the very sweetness of the woods and fields—a homely gentle atmosphere of moral quiet and beauty. It is for these, and not for the exaggerated poetical maundering of his larger poems, that his name will be remembered in the world.