DENOUEMENT OF M. DE LAMARTINE'S CONFIDENCE.
MiLre is to be sold after all, and M. de Lamartine is to part with his natal estate. The loss is the more to be regretted since the Revolutionary leader has laid so much stress on the pos- session of this land, and must be expected therefore to derive less consolation from his philosophy and poetry than one might an- ticipate from his pretensions in those pursuits. The bargain Which was to have redeemed the sale is among the matters con- fided to the public in the author's Confidences; and it is a cha- racteristic affair. The estate was burdened with debts, insomuch that the owner was obliged to sell it—the land of his ancestors, of his boyish recollections. He had amused himself with writing an autobiographical reminiscence, an account of his first or rather se- cond love, if such it can be called where no love was on his side. This he read to a friend, who was delighted ; a bookseller offered a handsome amount for so many volumes of autobiography ; M. de Lamartine shillyshallied, in a manner which he seems to think indicative of the right feeling, the true delicacy ; but he was brought to a point by the threatened sale of his patrimony : here Was a conflict of delicaeies, and he made the larger sacrifice, by selling his confidence to the public and redeeming the ground sa- cred to his ancestors.
M. de Lamartine does not scorn to follow examples, but he im- proves upon them: he consents to be like Rousteau, only greater. Rousseau gave forth his Confessions, which were to instruct the lelf-Tvrapped disingenuous intolerance of man, and to fetch out of candour better counsel and kinder intercourse ; their whole power derivable from the transparent truth. M. de Lamartine deems Confessions indelicate, so he selects only such Confidences as are engaging; and those he "touches up," heightening, softening, colouring, and adorning the historical piece which he paints from the looking-glass. Rousseau was the example ad euitandunt ; M. de Lamartine finds that it is he who is to supply the complement, the example ad imitandum. Rousseau was great, downwards ; M. de Lamartine modestly thinks that he perhaps is not so great, but it is heavenwards : Rousseau was the sublime abyss, he is the sublime mountain. But, somehow, the example is not so effective in the improved fashion ; for it lacks the one principle of life— truth. He has beautified until you cannot distinguish the fact from the fiction which is founded on it. Its untruth is manifest in the single trait of internal evidence, that he reports conversations uttered years ago, which could not possibly survive in the most retentive. memory. Great part of those conversations must be fabricated; but they are indistinguishable from the general tissue. Again, the book has a peculiar immorality which is very offen- sive. M. de Lamartine labours so to convey to you his own profound conviction, that he overdoes it, and convinces you Of something else. His profound conviction is that he is the greatest, sublimest, and most exquisite of mortals : his self-por- trait is that of an intellectual, wathetical, and physical Apollo Belvidere—a dandy deity. But, to Scoticize Mr. Landor's ver- sion of Shakspere's text, in his "vaulting ambition he o'erleaps his sel,'" and falls in the opposite direction. The initial episode of Graziella, which is told in great part with much power and art, describes a charming Neapolitan peasant girl dying with love for the most poetical, primitive, and refined of youths ; the survivor, in his elderly memory, working away with his practised and not unpaid pen, to show how her passion was justified : but his attention is concentrated mainly on himself—and was so then ; he was self-mindful and forgetful of her; he only, as a French critic says, "permitted himself to be adored," and was so little occupied by the feeling that he was able to store up every trait which should indicate his own grace, his own more refined taste, his own less earthly aspirations, his own tender, intellectual, chaste imagination : she died for love—he collected materials for a pretty autobiographical episode to adorn his memoirs withal. The Confidences, and its singular complement Raphael, are all of this tissue. In Raphael, M. de Lamartine paints himself pla- tonically adoring a lady who was devoted to the service of Diana by a disease of the heart, which made her afraid to unite with him in a more fervent worship. That lady, so "pure" under penalty, is the beau ideal of his adoration.
These literary traits of self-exposure help to explain M. de La- martine's political failures: he is not content with fact and truth ; he relies on a beautified counterfeit of truth ; his own aim is something different from the thing that is really to be attained. As in the autobiography every living soul is appropriated as an accessory to the portrait of Lamartine, so the Republic was to be a background for an historical portrait of Lamartine. He is not content to be a great man, but must be a great something more than man. He is to be a great poet, without the self-forgetfulness of the fine phrensy ; a great lover, without undergoing the domi- nion of a subduing passion ; a great statesman, but released from vulgar considerations of details and practicabilities—a statesman whose trouble is not to go beyond the attitude and the eloquence. As chief of the Provisional Government, he got up a sublime pic- ture of a revolutionary chief, Jovelike bestriding the storm : but it was only a picture, not a working sublimity ; and his govern- ment fell to pieces. He attempts to write the " History of the Revolution of 1848 " ; but, says M. Eugene Forcade, "this is not khistory, it is an impotent apology"; it is also a laboured at- tempt to display the hero "Lamartine" in grand situations, him- self grander than they.
The failure of the bargain that was to redeem Milly is imputed to the Revolution, which has paralyzed the bookseller's plans. The bookseller might well reply, that the work is not worth the bargain ; and further, that if M. de Lamartine had addressed himself as zealously to redeem France in the hour of her peril as he did to display himself, he would have prevented the Revolu- tion from proving so ruinous to booksellers. He seems to have forgotten everything in public affairs which he did not deem materials for an autobioggaphy ; and a similar spirit pervades his career of private life as he describes it—he frustrates the Revolu- tion, and loses his estate. He had failed in learning the lesson that nothing is greater than truth. He passes from the sublime to the ridiculous ; not gratis, for the step has cost him a nation's gratitude, a presidency, an estate, and a bookseller's custom for his wares.
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