The Sun.
London, England, 1849-03-27 00:00:00

LONDON, TUESDAY EVENING, MARCH 27, 1849,

LAMARTINE'S NEW WORK.

MEMOIRS OF MY YOUTH. By Alphonse

de Lanzartine.

One of the principal attractions of the brilliant
journal of M. Emile de Girardin has recently termi-
nated. The poet of Jocelyn, the pilgrim of Holyland,
the historian of the Girondists, the hero of February,
has closed that narrative of his youth which has long
been appearing in fragments in the feuilleton of La
Presse. Now that these remarkable revelations have
been completed, we find them in a little volume*
translated into our mother tongue. The fascination
of the work is singular, and its singularity is attri-
butable more to the novelty of the theme than to the
genius of the writer. Charming as the poetical de-
lineations of scenery are throughout the twelve books,
winning as are the sentiments, inspired as is the elo-
quence, and touching as is the pervading melancholy
of the whole confession—we cannot but see at once
that the spell which binds one to the volume from the
first sentence until the end of the last chapter, from
the infant remembrance of Milly to the twilight
walk among the suburbs of Chambery, is th?
knowledge that we are perusing a record of
the obscure childhood of a great man penned by
him in the midst of his greatness. We are
permitted to penetrate into the darkness and lowli-
ness of the past guided by a beam of glory from the
present. On beginning to read the introductory
passages it is impossible to conjecture that behind the
curtain of that calm and monotonous infancy there
lie so many strange and enthralling adventures. You
linger over the descriptions of the little household in
which Alphonse Marie Louis de Lamartine first saw
the light. You hear his sorrowing but melodious
voice chaunting the apotheosis of his mother's virtues
until you acknowledge with reverence the truth of
that beautiful phrase (p. 22) " our mother's look is a
portion of our soul which penetrates into our being
through the portals of our eyes." You pause over
the account of that parent's
maiden existence—
brought up in the palace of St. Cloud with the chil-
dren of Egalite, learning the same lessons, and en-
joying the same sports with the King Louis Philippe
—until you see the child Alia des Roys, blooming
into the wife of the Chevalier de Lamartine. You
watch the career of that honourable but impoverished
gentleman from his: marriage, when thirty-eight,
to his death, when ninety. You gaze again
and again into the parlour of the little house near
Macon, until your imagination becomes familiarized
with the group formed there fifty-two years ago by
that father, and that mother, and those eight children.
You follow the eldest of those children until he
emerges from the Jesuit College at Belley, on the
frontiers of France and Savoy, where he has been
educated, and gradually, little by little, the conscious-
ness that so much fire of heart, of mind, of soul, and
of ambition, cannot remain long within the limits of
common-place boundaries dawns on you—and you
read on chapter by chapter with the curiosity of one
reading something more severe than fiction, some-
thing more surprising than romance. One by one
you obtain a glimpse into the mysterious obscurities
of this destiny—the " first love" Lucy L * *
the " first verses" of this poet (p. 95)—the " first
speech" of this orator (p. 194)—the first sorrow in
this life of calamities—the first enterprise in this ca-
reer of vicissitudes. When the reader has gone so far
he recognises the force of that plaintive excuse
made by the author for his constitutional seriousness
(p. 34.), his life dating, like so many others, from
those gloomy days which have "imparted to French
literature a tinge of sadness and an impress of me-
lancholy." In the course of the narrative of his
youthful griefs and pleasures it is impossible but that
such a mind as that of Larnartine should scatter here
and there thoughts sparkling with the lustre of his
genius and coloured by the hues of his imagination.
Occasionally the thoughts are odd enough, as where
he terms (p. 157) the fruit called medlars " those
grandchildren of the orange." But more frequently
the ideas are golden, stamped with the effigies of
rhetoric. Like Aladdin passing through the garden
of precious stones, some of these jewels have clung
to the trailing folds of our memory. We cull them
from those recesses of recollection and present them
to our readers :
PATHOS TRUE GENIUS.—" He who knows how to melt
the heart knows all. There is more of genius in one
tear than in all the museums and in all the libraries of
the universe. Man is like a tree which is shaken to
make it yield its fruit ; he is never moved that tears do
not fall."

A HOUSEHOLD.—" Every family is a history in itself,
and even a poem, to those who know how to search its
pages."
A THUNDERBOLT FOR THE SOCIALISTS.—" I can un-
derstand the wish to extend the boundaries of family ;
but to destroy it !—it is a blasphemy against nature,
and an outrage on the human heart."
THE COUNT DE MAISTRE.—" His genius was only
rough hewn, but it was of mighty proportions. He was
a savage Ftossuet, and an illiterate Tertullian."
PAUL AND VIRGINIA.—" That manual of artless love;
a book which seems a page borrowed from the childhood
of the world, torn from the history of the human heart,
and preserved all pure and all bathed in tears contagious
for the eyes of sixteen."
OSSIAN.—" That poet of the vague and undefined,
that mist of the imagination, that inarticulate plaint of
the northern seas, that foam of the waves, that murmur of
the shadows, that eddying of the clouds around the tem-
pest-beaten peaks of Scotland, that northern Dante, as
grand, as majestic, as supernatural as the Dante of
Florence, and more sensible than he, and who often
wrings from his phantoms cries more human and more
heartrending than those of the heroes of Homer.
Curious scholars have pretended, and still pretend, that
he never existed nor wrote, and that his poems are a
forgery of Macpherson's. I should as soon believe that
Salvator Rosa invented nature."
CRIME.—" Open depravity is the ideal reversed ; it is
the parody of physical and moral beauty: it is the crime
of the mind ; it is the brutalizing of the imagination."
MICHAEL ANGELO—" Is the Moses of architectural
Catholicism. He has erected an imperishable ark for
future times, a Pantheon of Reason purified and rendered
divine, an apotheosis in stone, a monumental transfigu-
ration of the religion of Christ."

As a final quotation, we give a paragraph descrip-
tive of the writer's appearance when a child
" I was permitted to grow up, to become strong and
handsome, by battling, winter and summer, with the ele-
ments. This regimen agreed with me to a miracle, and
I was at that period one of the handsomest children who
ever trod with their naked fret the rocks of our moun-
tains, where the human race is nevertheless so healthy
and so fair. Eyes of a dark blue, like those of my mo-
ther; features pure and almost Romaa in their outline,
softened by a rather pensive expression like her own; a
dazzling ray of inward joy lighting up the whole coun-
tenance; soft, fine hair of a golden brown, like the ripe
husk of the Chesnut, falling in waves rather than curls
over my neck, embrowned by exposure to the sun; a fi-
gure already tall for my age, agile, flexible, and grace-
ful in its movements; with merely an extreme delicacy
of skin, which also descended to me from my mother, and
a readiness to blush and grow pale, which displayed the
fineness of the tissues, the rapidity and the power of the
emotions of the heart on the features; in a word, the por-
trait of my mother, with the addition of a manly accent
and an expression—such was the child I was at
that age,"
Anecdotes of the most entertaining character
abound throughout the " Memoirs," from the stolen
interviews between the father and mother of the author,
when the former was a prisoner during the Reign of
Terror, to the episode of the love story of the Abbe
Dumont before he became an ecclesiastic. But the
whole charm of the work is concentrated in the exqui-
site narrative relating to Graziella. One portion of
this latest of the productions of M. de Lamartine we
have reserved until the last for consideration—it is
that in which he speaks of the greatest Emperor
who ever existed on this earth—Napoleon.
Upon the subject of Napoleon, M. de Lamartine
evinces a littleness of mind which is absolutely
astounding in a man of such enlarged and remarkable
genius. He not only displays upon this point a pre-
judice unworthy of so noble an intellect, but a detes-
tation unbefitting a heart so good and generous.
When first he mentions the name of the Emperor, he
avows at once, in so many words, his profound and
inextinguishable HATRED "for the hero of the age," a
hatred, (these are his own words, page 109), " a
hatred the offspring at once of feeling and of reason,
which reflection and time have only justified, not-
withstanding the vile flatterers of his memory—a
hatred which lam proud to have preserved through
life, and which I hope to retain till death." Even
Supposing this were spoken of a man still living, it
would be hideous. But when we remember that the
august remains of the imperial conqueror are reposing
in their tomb " on the banks of the Seine, in the
midst of the French people whom he loved so well,"
when we remember that the great heart of Napoleon
has ceased to beat, that his glorious eyes are closed
for ever, and that his anointed brow is cold in death,
we may well ask if such harsh and cruel expressions
are worthy of a believer in Christianity. Our whole
soul revolts from them, and we pass on. So
deep and virulent, however, is the animosity
of M. de Lamartine for the Giant who saved the
Revolution from being trodden into the dust by five
successive coalitions, and who raised his country from
being the opprobrium to be the arbiter and mistress
of the world, that he condescends to degrade his pen
into the miserable weapon of a caricaturist, After
the ignominious flight of Louis XVIII.) aflight
which he absurdly attempts to gloze over as an act
little short of the chivalrous, M. de Lamartine returns
to Paris. Recollect—it is the Hundred Days. He
goes to the Place de Carrousel and witnesses a review--
of the troops by the Emperor. Here is his ignoble
caricature of Napoleon's appearance on that occasion :
" His head was buried in his shoulders. His large
and livid cheeks protruded beyond the tight collar of rhies
uniform. His features, which were as yellow
aorange, seemed to perspire with anxiety. His forehead
was wrinkled with the cares of his situation."

We call this a vile caricature, and we do so not so
much because every other account of Napoleon's
appearance proves its falsity in each particular, as by
reason of the circumstance that we happen to have at
our elbow at the time we are now writing, a contra-
diction—in point—of every line in that caricature.