BOOKS.
LA MAR TINE .*
IT is time that an impartial estimate should be made of Lamartine, and this volume sketches agreeably the life of a man whose political failure may well be forgotten in the lustre of his poetry, which fifty years hence will probably reconquer the admiration that of late years has waned. We are hardly yet sufficiently far off to judge truly of what is gold and what is glitter in his reputation as the master of splendid words, goodly of presence, enthusiastically loved, and swaying France to his changing beliefs. We have not yet recovered the undue reaction from our fathers' admiration of him, nor can we even now forgive the statesman whose glamour over-coloured truths of which he professed to be the most authentic prophet. " With the mass of materials at her disposal, Lady Margaret Domvile might well have elaborated her work further. Why has it no preface, but scanty references, and no index or even chapter-headings ? La,martine was a poet whose sweet and noble verses were in the mouth of every educated Frenchman as soon as they were published ; and that in the last decade of the Restoration, when French taste was indefinitely better than it is now. A politician who for three months dictated. not only the government but the sentiment of his nation, Lamartine marks a high level in the intellectual tides of the century. In a second edition we hope that Lady Margaret Domvile may add largely to her sketch, and give us a more thoughtful and critical portrait of a man whose measure has not yet been fairly taken. She is evidently afraid to like her hero too much ; she has not had enough courage whether of praise or blame ; she does not sufficiently criticise his vanity as the fatal weakness which marred his career and dominated his genius, and leaves us cold even yet to the fine quality of his nature and of his earlier work ; nor does she adequately admire the almost perfect beauty of his shorter poems, written before his thirtieth year. In what language is there a creation of more clinging charm than " Le Lac " ? Where in more graceful form are the eternally sad problems of human existence summed up than in others of the Meditations, and even in the less excellent, because more verbose and more ambitious, Harmonies ? Change of taste, rust and wreck of that perfected machine, the French language, can never destroy the aesthetic value of Lamartine's elegies. Lady Mar- garet Domvile quotes the sympathetic praise of Amiel and of Hildebrandt the historian ; she follows Scherer in his fine recognition of poetry of which probably he feels the short- comings more keenly than would many other critics ; yet she falters in her faith. It is certain that few Englishmen appreciate French verse. If proof were needed of the in- herently different sympathies which distinguish French from English art, it is to be found in their diversity of poetical expression ; and it is but natural that the author should dwell more on Lamartine as he swayed politics than as he caught up the poetic sentiment of his race and his epoch, and uttered it. Yet it is by his Meditations that he will live beside, if not above, his big brother, Victor Hugo, in the literature of the century. By a sequence of events that would have been puzzling to Englishmen fifty years ago, the unsurpassed monarch of words replaced Louis Philippe, the King of the Philistines, as the master of France. Words were his big battalions, and perhaps in no instance have the uses and abuses of words been more apparent than in Lamartine. Lady M. Domvile writes pleasantly and well of his good birth and parentage, and of his boyish trials of poverty and irregular education during the revolutionary decade of 1790-1800. We could wish that she had given us a more critical estimate of how the violent evolution of those years reacted on his impressionable temperament. What part in him had his boyish idol, Rousseau, and the humani- tarians ? How, during the tyranny of violent action under Napoleon, was prepared the outbreak of literature, and that other tyranny of fine sentiments finely expressed which • Life of Lamartine. By Lady Margaret Domvile. London : Kogan Paul and Co. 1588. followed the Bourbon restoration, and of which Lamartine was no mean author? What was in the air when Bonaparte the Doer and Ibs.martine the Singer ranked Macpherson's Ossian as the first of poets, " except, perhaps, father Homer," as Lamartine allowed reluctantly ? Our readers will find in the facts of his early life, as told in this volume, suggestions rather than solutions of problems that have perpetual interest. As the hundred years are now all but completed since Lamar- tine's birth, these facts have something of the value of those splendid sunsets which told us of the volcanic fury in Java ; in studying them we touch the secrets of history. The boy- hood of Lamartine was, indeed, sheltered, as far as might be, by the love of an admirable mother. Her influence restrained in a great measure, while she lived, the vague and unpractical drift to which he always tended. She was essentially true, and checked his unreality of thought and belief. Possibly Madame de Lamartine contributed to her son's egotism by her tenderness to the rather pompous boy in his many scrapes; but her piety and her example of womanly virtue deepened the sentiment and elevated the thought in her son's earlier poems. The best of them are inspired by the facts of his private life, his love-affairs, and the impression made on him by scenery when he was under stress of strong emotion; but their aspiration and spirituality are less marked as her influence beoomes less powerful. He had few strong convictions at any time; he never knew him- self sufficiently to have a sense of humour ; he was too sensi- tively sympathetic to resist the attraction now of Royalists, now of Girondins. His mother had been the friend's friend of the saintly Princess Elizabeth of France, and she handed down to him that tradition of respect for authority, divine and human, and for family life, which was the truest note in the literature of the Restoration. It partially controlled in him the effects of Rousseau's doctrines, and his ardent belief in the vox populi only appeared when he found that he could sway its acclamation. The fact that Lamartine's poetry was as a rainbow after the deluge which had undone old France, secured for it perhaps an exaggerated welcome; but it does not merit the neglect of our less romantic and coarser period.
We know not with which English poet to compare Lamar- tine. It is easier to say which statesman of our time is curiously like him. He is haunted, like W ordsworth and Shelley, by the passion that groans beneath inanimate things ; but he cries for the sympathy of Nature in less noble moods and for less noble cause than -does Wordsworth. He is too full of self to learn from her. He loves her in her gaudier aspects at Beim and at Aix, or in her Alpine glooms when she ministers to his revolutionary theories, or to his youthful loyalties as in his exquisite idylls of Burgundian life and landscape. His love for woman is of the same quality, and about it he has no reserve ; his " Gmziella " describes his first passion, " Rafael " his devotion to Madame Charles, and we know by his own confession how these violent emotions gave a power and pathos to his poetry that his creative faculty could not supply. " Elvire" may be said to have made a poet of him, but from earliest boyhood he had laboured to perfect his gift of language, and he felt to the full that devotion to Nature which was in vogue. Shut out from professional work by family tradition, he had given himself unreservedly to litera- ture ; but only the fire of personal passion could have fused his thoughts into some of the Meditations, which, after all, leave criticism disarmed.
In 1820 they were published, and Lamartine found himself hailed as not only the inventor of romantic poetry, the inter- preter of that spiritual weariness which was a reaction from preceding strain, and the bard of that revival of Christianity of which Chateaubriand was the prophet in prose. At once pietistic and humanist, a compound essence of De Maistre's archaic Soirees de St. Petersbourg and of the Nouvelle Heloise, he was delightful both to the Duchesses whether of the pre- or of the post-revolutionary era, and to the new France of Balzac and De Musset. Fashion seized on him, and pro- fited him little by encouraging his defects of extravagance, sentimental and financial ; but a certain innate dignity and optimistic aim, a refined vanity, and a prudent marriage, kept his ambitions pure as they ever were. An increased love of antithesis and verbal effect, however, an Ossianic vagueness and an emphasised religiosity, leave the reader colder after reading the Harmonies, published in 1827. The absence of faith in the objects of his sonorous worship is faintly per- ceptible, and there are hints of even audacious doubt. Aa he revealed himself by letter or otherwise to his adorers, there were certain shocks alike to classical and to romantic taste. Of Roman sights, he preferred St. Peter's and Canova's studio. Marvellous criticisms—as, for instance, that he preferred a French translation of his favourite Tasso to the original—filtered through his correspondence, and leave us to think that it was partly because he was the mouthpiece of his contemporaries that they, with nice complacency, worshipped his superiority of genius. But meantime, his elegies made him Secretary of Legation and virtually Minister at Florence, and the highest diplomatic posts were at his command after the appearance of the Harmonies.
Lady M. Domvile seems to appreciate the orator above the bard. We are not of that opinion ; but it would be difficult not to admire the laborious worker, the upright citizen, the refined and sweet-tempered knight-errant who rode forth re- dressing human wrongs in such glittering armour, with but one visible cloud on his brow, the cloud of incessant pecuniary trouble, and its train of ignoble shifts. The dynastic change of 1830 opened to him vistas of liberal optimism, and they wooed him to triumph by rhetoric in Parliament, as he had done by poetry in the Academy. He worked at it as if he had to pass a competitive examination, and quickly took a high place—soon to be the highest—in political oratory.
It is rather fruitless labour to follow Lamartine through ten years of Louis Philippe's Parliaments. There were " superb oratorical tournaments " in which he took a brilliant part ; but what is even the celebrated speech in which he topped all other effort by the declaration, " La France s'ennuie !" compared to one step '..a of "Le Vallon " ? His oratory is matter of tradition, as is the enormous success of his History of the Girondins, pub- lished in 1847. It proved his singular gift of opportuneness, and of sympathy with men's moods, to be so vivid as to enable him to prophesy by instinct rather than by reason. He created the legend of the Girondins ; intoxicated by his own eloquence, he became one, and that just at the moment when Europe was throbbing with desire for change, and with the " virtuous " optimism of Vergniaud and Roland. The sale of the book was great ; Lamartine received £16,000 in money, and was promoted to the leadership of all men of " light and leading," the faddists and the benign believers in a Utopia where government can be carried on by speechifying. Lamartine was so pleased to " ride on the whirlwind" of February, 1848, that he avoided with tact all direct interference till the fate of the Royalty was decided. We give him credit for believing that he could do better than Louis Philippe, Thiers, Guizot, and Bugeaud put together. He was third in the list of the Provisional Govern- ment named by the Chamber, in company with the Radicals, Ledru Rollin and Cremieux, and at last the moment seemed to have come for a really fine display of his courage, his good looks, and his splendid use of words. Proclamations flowed from his pen; he was generous to the harried salons, to dismayed Princesses, and played saviour to his former associates. He understood the beat traditions of parade, and one day he was even greeted by the mob as First Consul. " All this is very great," wrote Mr. Greville. English people were delighted with this glittering St. Michael of radical reform, putting his foot on its ugly brood. Yet M. de Fallon, who in his admirable Memoirs has lately given his version of Lamar- tine's conduct in the rising of May 15th, when he and the Orleanist De Mornay—not Horny, as Lady M. Domvile prints —acted as bodyguard to the poet-dictator, leaves it but too clear that Lamartine had neither convictions nor the power they confer, under his panoply of phrases. If he had grasped supreme power, as perhaps he might have done, how long could he have held it P Already he was taunted by shouts of " Assez joue de la lyre !" In the Parliament of May 4th, he had been returned for ten Departments. In June, his voice was silenced by Cavaignac's guns. In the plebiscite for the Presidency, he received but nineteen thousand votes ; and in the next Parliament, only the resignation of his seat by a friend gained Lamartine a place. " France has gone mad," he writes ; " a Republic to end in a promenade de Fran,coni ! " The madness was his, if he had counted on the voices of the mob. Nowhere, he professed, was he so eloquent as before a crowd; and, unhappily, he had not understood that though crowds have passions and interests, they have no respon- sibility of conscience, and can be bound by no ties. The persons composing them lose their individuality, and Philip sober, alone, does not ratify the shouts of Philip intoxicated by the contagion of a mob. The story of Lamartine's remaining life is but a record of incessant and plodding labour to fill his leaking purse, labour in which his defects of style are almost necessarily accentuated. Yet during those years of broken health and utmost effort, he seems to us more heroic than before. His three months' tenure of office had left him £120,000 the poorer. On one occasion alone he had spent £3,000 of his private means to check a petty rising and save bloodshed. He might have held office under the Empire, and Louis Napoleon repeatedly and with the utmost delicacy offered to pay his debts. The first orator of France, however, would accept nothing from the silent, awkward parvenu who spoke with a foreign accent and never spelt quite rightly. The word " Bona- parte " had over-crowed Lamartine's rhetoric, for.it was a word which carried with it memories of deeds. Lamartine learned in the sad grey years of old age that he had conjured with but the shadows of virtues. Only the discipline of ruthless events dispersed for him the mirage of his own words, if it ever were dispersed. The dream-faces of his mother, his wife, of Graziella and Elvire, had left him before the end. " You are of those to whom life is already but an ex- pectation," Victor Hugo wrote to him. Yet the figure of the weary paladin of noble sentiments gains in beauty and dignity as he laboured to pay every debt, and finally succeeded by the production of amazing numbers of books,—fifteen in one year. He hardly paused in his labour except to "welcome his friends with his accustomed gracious urbanity." His summons to die found him serenely ready ; and he received the last offices of piety from his friend, the Abbe Duguerry, who was murdered the following year, during the Commune. His early poetry is irradiated by just that touch of sincerity and truth which it needed, in these records of his last twenty years of faithful and honest work ; and we should give reverent ear to this exquisite poet of regret, of human burden, and human longing "for the wings of a dove," singing to us his immortally sweet strains of human inadequacy. It is not less felt now than when the century was young, whatever the form of that haunting pessimism for which we would fain think Lamartine found before his death the only true relief.