Chapter XXII: Lamartine

1791-1869.

Lamartine, the man, was an image incongruously molded of gold and of clay. Take him at his best, and what is there better? Take him at his worst, and you would not wish worse.

The same contrast holds, but not in the same degree, in Lamartine the author. He is at once one of the most admirable, and one of the least admirable, of writers.

There are few figures in history worthier to command the homage of generous hearts than the figure of Lamartine in 1848, calming and quelling the mob of Paris by the simple ascendant of genius and of bravery. There are few figures in history more abject than the figure of Lamartine, toward the close of his life, in the garb of a beggar holding out his hat to mankind for the pence and half-pence of wonder, of sympathy, and of sympathetic shame.

Perhaps we instinctively fall into some contagious conformity to Lamartine's own exaggerating rhetoric in expressing ourselves as we do.

The chief facts of the life of Alphonse Marie Louis de Prat de Lamartine are briefly these. Well-born, having for mother a woman of more than Cornelian, of Christian, virtue, who herself mainly educated her son, he traveled, loved, lost, wept "melodious tears"--mixed much in Parisian society, until, at thirty, he published under the title "Meditations," a volume of verse which made him instantly, brilliantly, triumphantly, famous. Every thing desirable was easy to him now. He married an Englishwoman of wealth, he wrote and published more poetry, amusing himself meantime with various diplomatic service, was made member of the French Academy, and in 1832 went traveling in the East, like an Eastern prince for lavish splendor of equipage and outlay. His book, "Memories of the Orient," published three years after, was the fruit of what he saw and felt and dreamed during this luxurious experience of travel. Dreamed, we say, for Lamartine drew freely on his imagination to expand and embellish his memories of the East. Other volumes of verse, his "Jocelyn," his "Fall of an Angel," and his "Recollections" followed speedily.

The Revolution of 1830 had seated Louis Philippe on the throne. Lamartine under him had been elected to the legislature of France and had been making reputation as an orator. The poet and orator would now be historian. Lamartine wrote his celebrated "History of the Girondists," which, after first appearing in numbers, was issued in volume in 1847. This book had in it the fermenting principle of a fresh revolution. In 1848 that revolution came, and Louis Philippe fled from Paris and from France, in precipitate abdication of his throne.

Now was the moment of glory and of opportunity for Lamartine. During the three months following, he may be said to have ruled France. Eloquence and bravery together never won triumphs more resplendent than were Lamartine's during this swift interval of his dizzy elevation to power. He was in title simply minister for foreign affairs, in a provisional government which he had had himself the decision and the intrepidity among the first to propose. But his personal popularity, his serene courage, his magical eloquence, gave him much the authority of dictator. It cannot be asserted that Lamartine, in this crisis, proved himself a statesman able to cope with the stern exactions of the hour. The candidate for such distinction success only can crown, and Lamartine did not succeed. He fell, as suddenly and as swiftly as he had risen. Yesterday omnipotent, he was absolutely impotent to-day.

But nothing can deprive Lamartine of the pacific glory his due from several extraordinary feats of eloquence achieved by him, at imminent risk to himself, on behalf of mankind. A mob of forty thousand Parisian fanatics roared into the street before the Hotel de Ville to compel the Provisional Government sitting there to adopt the red flag as the ensign of the republic. This meant nothing less than a new reign of terror for France. Lamartine, single-handed, met the wild beast to its teeth, and with one stroke of the sword that went forth from his mouth laid it tamed at his feet. "The red flag you bring us," cried the orator to the mob, he shining the while resplendent in a personal beauty touched with the gleam of genius and glorified with the consecration of courage--like a descended Apollo, the rattling quiver borne on his shoulder--"The red flag you bring us," said he, "has only gone round the Champ de Mars, trailed in the blood of the people--in 1791 and in 1793; while the tricolor has gone round the world, with the name, the glory, and the liberty of our country." This eloquent condensation of history, untremblingly shot, at close quarters, full in the face of those wild-eyed insurgents, felled them, as if it had been a ball from a cannon. But ranks from behind still pressed forward with menacing cries. "Down with Lamartine!" "Down with the time-server!" "Off with his head! His head! His head! Lamartine's head!"

The brandished weapons were in Lamartine's very face. But that gentle blood never blenched. "My head, citizens? You want my head? Indeed, but I wish you had it, every one of you. If Lamartine's head were now on each pair of shoulders among you, you would be wiser than you are, and the revolution would go on more prosperously." The mob was in Lamartine's hand again, taken captive with a jest.

It is generally granted that Lamartine saved the nation from a new reign of terror. But eloquence is not statesmanship; and Lamartine, weighed in the balance, was found wanting. He served at last only to hand over the state to Louis Napoleon, first president, and then emperor.

Under Napoleon, Lamartine, now and henceforward simply a private citizen, found his affairs embarrassed. He had been a prodigal spender of money. He toiled at letters to mend his broken fortunes. But his sun was past its meridian, and it settled hopelessly in cloud toward its west. He wrote a pseudo-biography of himself and published it as a serial in one of the Paris daily newspapers. He almost literally with his own hands performed the profaneness execrated by the poet, and "tare his heart before the crowd"--or would have done so, if his production, the "Confidences," so called, had really been what it purported to be, the actual story of his life. It was in fact as much imagination as revelation. But the once overwhelmingly popular author now cheapened himself before the public in almost every practicable way. He brought his own personal dignity to market in his works--and did this over and over again. The public bought their former idol at his own cheapened price, and he still remained poor. In 1850 a public subscription was opened for his relief. As a last humiliation, the proud patrician submitted to accept a pension from the empire of Louis Napoleon. This he enjoyed but two years, for in two years after he died. A further space of two years, and the empire itself that granted Lamartine his pension had met its Sedan and ceased to be.

Fresh from admiring the radiant pages of Lamartine's rhetoric in prose, from admiring the iridescent play in color, the deliquescent melody in sound, of his verse, we feel it painful to admit to ourselves that so much indisputably fine effect goes for little or nothing, now that the fashion of that world of taste and feeling for which this writer wrote has passed returnlessly away. But so it is. Lamartine, like Chateaubriand, and for substantially the same reason, namely, lack of fundamental genuineness, has already reached that last pathetic phase, well-nigh worse than total eclipse, of literary fame, the condition of an author important in the history of literature, rather than in literature.

Poet, orator, historian, statesman, this munificently gifted nature was most profoundly, most controllingly, poet. But he was French poet, which is to say that his poetry is removed, if not quite from access to the English mind, at least from access to the English mind through translation. He, however, enjoyed at first high English reputation as poet, and the publication of "Jocelyn," his masterpiece in verse, may be said to have been even a European event in literary history.

The story of "Jocelyn" is avouched by the author to be almost a series of actual occurrences. This assertion, to those familiar with Lamartine's style in asserting, will not be quite so conclusive as on its face it appears. At any rate, if "Jocelyn" be truth, Lamartine has made truth read like fiction, and fiction of a highly improbable sort. The story, true or fictitious--and which it is, as nobody now knows, so nobody now cares--we need not detain our readers to report.

The poet staggered his public by printing on the title-page to his "Jocelyn" the words, "An Episode," as much as to say that a certain "Epic of Humanity," which he might finally (but which, as a matter of fact, he never did) produce, would be large enough to make shrink into the dimensions of a mere episode this poem of ten thousand lines more or less!

Now for an extract or two. In the "Edinburgh Review," of a date not far from fifty years past now, we find our translation. A day of festival, followed by a long evening of out-door dancing to music, has just closed. The breaking-up is described, with the sequel of young Jocelyn's pensive and yearning emotions:

Then later, when the fife and hautboy's voice
Began to languish like a failing voice,
And moistened ringlets, by the dance unstrung,
Close to the cheek in drooping tresses clung,
And wearied groups along the darkening green
Gliding, in converse soft and low, were seen,
What sounds enchanting to the ear are muttered!
Adieus, regrets, the kiss, the word half uttered--
My soul was stirred; my ear with sweet sounds rife
Drank languidly the luscious draught of life;
I followed with my step, my heart, my eye,
Each maiden that with wearied eyes went by,
Thrilled at the rustle of each silken dress,
And felt that each that passed still left a joy the less.
At last the dance is hushed, the din at rest,
The moon is risen above the mountain's crest;
Only some lover, heedless of the hour,
Wends homeward, dreaming, to his distant bower;
Or, where the village paths divide, there stand
Some loitering couples, lingering hand in hand,
Who start to hear the clock's unwelcome knell,
Then dive and vanish in the forest dell.

And now I am at home alone. 'Tis night.
All still within the house, no fire, no light.
Let me, too, sleep. Alas! no sleep is there!
Pray then. My spirit will not hear my prayer.
My ear is still with dancing measures ringing,
Echoes which memory back to sense is bringing;
I close my eyes: before my inward glance
Still swims the _fete_, still whirls the giddy dance;
The graceful phantoms of the vanished ball
Come flitting by in beauty each and all;
A glance still haunts my couch; a soft hand seems
To press my hand, that trembles in my dreams,
Fair tresses in the dance's flight brought nigh,
Just touch my cheek, and like the wind flow by,
I see from maiden brows the roses falling,
I hear beloved lips my name recalling--
Anne, Lucy, Blanche!--Where am I--What is this?
What must love be, when even love's dream is bliss!

There is an indefinable French difference, but, that apart, the foregoing is somewhat like Goldsmith in his "Deserted Village." Or is it the resemblance of meter that produces the impression?

"Jocelyn," though certainly intended by the author to be pure, wavers at points on the edge of the exceptionably ambiguous. The following spring song, however, put by the poet into the mouth of his Laurence, is an inspiration as innocent as it is sweet:

See, in her nest, the nightingale's mute mate,
Hatching her young, her patient vigil hold.
See how with love her fostering wings dilate,
As if to screen her nurslings from the cold.

Her neck alone, in restlessness upraised,
O'ertops the nest in which her brood reposes,
And her bright eye, with weary watching glazed,
Closing to sleep, with every sound uncloses.

Care for her callow young consumes her rest,
My very voice her downy bosom shakes,
And her heart pants beneath its plumy vest,
And the nest trembles with each breath she takes.

What spell enchains her to this gentle care?
Her mate's sweet melody the groves among,
Who, from some branching oak, high poised in air
Sends down the flowing river of his song.

Hark! dost thou hear him, drop by drop distilling
The sighs that sweetest after transport be,
Then suddenly the vault above us filling
With foaming cataracts of harmony?

What spell enchains him in his turn--what makes
His very being thus in languor melt--
But that his voice a living echo wakes,
His lay within one loving heart is felt!

And, ravished by the note, his mate still holds
Her watch attentive through the weary time;
The season comes, the bursting shell unfolds,
And life is music all, and love, and prime.

Passing now from Lamartine's poetry, expressly such, we go to his prose, which, however, is scarcely, if at all, less poetical. Poetry, or at least, the presence in power, and in great proportionate excess of power, of imagination, lording it over every thing else, over memory, judgment, taste, good sense, veracity--characterizes all that proceeded from Lamartine's pen. His history is valueless, almost valueless, as history. His travels are utterly untrustworthy as records of fact. Lamartine cannot tell the simple truth. Persons, things, events, suffer a sea-change, always to something rich and strange seen by him looming in the luminous haze of atmosphere with which his imagination perpetually invests them. His men are ennobled, like Ulysses transfigured by Pallas-Athene. His women are beautiful as houris fresh from paradise. The aspects of ocean and shore and wood and stream and mountain and sky, are all, to Lamartine, washed with a light that never was on sea or land or in heaven overhead, the consecration and the poet's dream. This quality in Lamartine's style does not prevent his being very fine. He is very fine; but you feel, Oh, if this all were also true!

On the whole, large, splendid, scenic, admirable in instinct for choosing his point of view, as Lamartine is in his histories, brilliant even, and fecund in suggestion, we turn from the ostensibly historical in our author to the ostensibly autobiographical, in order to find our prose specimens of his quality in the "Confidences." Lamartine never perhaps did any thing finer, any thing more characteristic, than in telling his story of "Graziella" in that work. This story is an "episode" where it appears; or rather--for it is hardly so much as let into the continuous warp and woof of the "Confidences"--it is a separable device of ornament embroidered upon the surface of the fabric. It is probably, indeed, to some extent autobiographic; but the imagination had as much part in it as the memory. For instance, the actual girl that is transfigured into the "Graziella" of the story was not a coral-grinder, as she is represented by Lamartine, but an operative in a tobacco factory. The real beauty of the tale is, by a kind of just retribution on the author, inseparably bound up with unconscious revelation on his part of heartless vanity and egotism in his own character. You admire, but while you admire you wonder, you reprobate, you contemn. A man such as this, you instinctively feel, was not worthy to live immortally as an author. You are reconciled to let Lamartine pass.

"Graziella" is a story of love and death, on one side, of desertion and expiation--expiation through sentimental tears--on the other. One would gladly trust, if one could, that the reality veiled under the fiction was as free in fact from outward guilt as it is idealized to have been by the writer's fancy. But neither this supposition, nor any other charitable supposition whatever, can redeem "Graziella" from the condemnation of being steeped in egregious vanity, egotism, and false sentiment, from the heart of the author.

We strike into the midst of the narrative, toward the end. There has been described the growth of relation between the author and the heroine of the idyll, a fisherman's daughter. And now this heroine, Graziella, is desired in marriage by a worthy young countryman of hers. Such a suitor--for she loves, though secretly, the author (this by the way is a thing almost of course with Lamartine)--the girl cannot bring herself to accept. In despair she flees to make herself a nun. She is found by the autobiographer alone in a deserted house. He ministers to her in her exhausted state--and this to the following result:

"I feel well," said she to me, speaking in a tone of voice that was
low, soft, even, and monotonous, as if her breast had completely lost
its vibration and its accent at the same time, and as if her voice had
only retained one single note. "I have in vain sought to hide it from
myself--I have in vain sought to hide it forever from thee. I may die,
but thou art the only one that I can ever love. They wished to
betroth me to another; thou art the one to whom my soul is betrothed.
I will never give myself to another on earth, for I have already
secretly given myself to thee. To thee on earth, or to God in heaven!
that is the vow I made the first day I discovered that my heart was
sick for thee! I well know that I am only a poor girl, unworthy to
touch thy feet even in thought; therefore, have I never asked thee to
love me. I never will ask thee if thou dost love me. But I--I love
thee, I love thee, I love thee!" And she seemed to concentrate her
whole soul in those three words. "Now despise me, mock me, spurn me
with thy feet! Laugh at me if thou wilt, as a mad thing who fancies
she is a queen in the midst of her tatters. Hold me up to the scorn of
the whole world! Yes, I will tell them with my own lips--'Yes, I love
him. And had you been in my place you would have done as I have--you
would have loved him or have died.'"

The man thus wooed by the maid assures her of his reciprocal affection. But the author explains to his readers:

Alas! it was not real love, it was but its shadow in my heart. But I
was too young and too ingenuous not to be deceived by it myself. I
thought that I adored her as so much innocence, beauty, and love
deserved to be adored by a lover. I told her so, with that accent of
sincerity which emotion imparts; with that impassioned restraint which
is imparted by solitude, darkness, despair, and tears. She believed it
because she required that belief to live, and because she had enough
passion in her own heart to make up for its insufficiency in a
thousand other hearts.

The autobiographer is summoned away by his mother, and he goes, lacerating Graziella's heart, but swearing a thousand oaths of fealty to his beloved. Alas! the "treacherous air of absence" undid all--with him, though not with her. He blames himself in retrospect--gently--and pities himself lamentably, as follows:

I was at that ungrateful period of life when frivolity and imitation
make a young man feel a false shame in the best feelings of his nature
... I would not have dared to confess ... the name and station of the
object of my regret and sadness.... How I blush now for having blushed
then! and how much more precious was one of the joy-beams or one of
the tear-drops of her chaste eyes than all the glances, all the
allurements, all the smiles for which I was about to sacrifice her
image! Ah! man, when he is too young, cannot love! He knows not the
value of any thing! He only knows what real happiness is after he has
lost it.... True love is the ripe fruit of life. At twenty, it is not
known, it is imagined.

A farewell letter from Graziella dying:

"The doctor says that I shall die in less than three days. I wish to
say farewell to thee ere I lose all my strength. Oh! if I had thee
near me, I would live! But it is God's will. I will soon speak to
thee, and forever, from on high. Love my soul! It shall be with thee
as long as thou livest. I leave thee my tresses, which were cut off
for thy sake one night. Consecrate them to God in some chapel in thy
own land, that something belonging to me may be near thee!"

The autobiographer "complied with the order contained in her dying behest." He says: "From that day forward, a shadow of her death spread itself over my features and over my youth." He apostrophizes the remembered Graziella as follows:

"Poor Graziella! Many days have flown by since those days. I have
loved, I have been loved. Other rays of beauty and affection have
illumined my gloomy path. Other souls have opened themselves for me,
to reveal to me in the hearts of women the most mysterious treasures
of beauty, sanctity, and purity that God ever animated on earth, to
make us understand, foretaste, and desire heaven; but nothing has
dimmed thy first apparition in my heart.... Thy real sepulcher is in
my soul. There every part of thee is gathered and entombed. Thy name
never strikes my ear in vain. I love the language in which it is
uttered. At the bottom of my heart there is always a warm tear which
filters, drop by drop, and secretly falls upon my memory, to refresh
it and embalm it within me."

The pensive poet even makes poetry on the subject, twenty years afterward, poetry which, in his customary triplets of expression, he calls "the balm of a wound, the dew of a heart, the perfume of a sepulchral flower." He wrote it, he says, "with streaming eyes." He prints his stanzas--for Lamartine is eminently of those who, as it has been said, weep in print and wipe their eyes with the public--and with a sigh, says:

Thus did I expiate by these written tears the cruelty and ingratitude
of my heart of nineteen. I have never been able to reperuse these
verses without adoring that youthful image which the transparent and
plaintive waves of the Gulf of Naples will roll eternally before my
eyes ... and without detesting myself! But souls forgive on high. Hers
has forgiven me. Forgive me also, you!--I have wept.

We ought not to disturb, with any further words of our own, the impression of himself which Lamartine has now made on the reader. He has given us here his own true image. He is the weeping poet. It is fit--let him dissolve, let him exhale, from view in tears.

Lachrymose Lamartine, farewell!