A History of French Literature Part 16

The episode of _Rene_, which was included in the _Genie_, and afterwards published separately, has been described as a Christianised _Werther_; its pa.s.sion is less frank, and even more remote from sanity of feeling, than that of Goethe's novel, but the sadness of the hero is more magnificently posed. A sprightly English lady described Chateaubriand as "wearing his heart in a sling"; he did so during his whole life; and through Rene we divine the inventor of Rene carrying his wounded heart, as in the heroine we can discern some features of his sister Lucile. In all his writings his feelings centre in himself: he is a pure egoist through his sensibility; but around his own figure his imagination, marvellous in its expansive power, can deploy boundless perspectives.

Both _Atala_ and _Rene_, though brought into connection with the _Genie du Christianisme_, are in fact more closely related to the prose epic _Les Natchez_, written early, but held in reserve until the publication of his collected works in 1826-31. _Les Natchez_, inspired by Chateaubriand's American travels, idealises the life of the Red Indian tribes. The later books, where he escapes from the pseudo-epic manner, have in them the finest spirit of his early years, his splendour and delicacy of description, his wealth of imaginative reverie. Famous as the author of the _Genie_, Chateaubriand was appointed secretary to the emba.s.sy at Rome. The murder of the Duc d'Enghien alienated him from Napoleon. Putting aside the _Martyrs_, on which he had been engaged, he sought for fresh imagery and local colour to enrich his work, in a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, a record of which was published in his (1811) _Itineraire de Paris a Jerusalem_.

The _Martyrs_ appeared in 1809. It was designed as a great example of that art, inspired by Christianity, on behalf of which he had contended in the _Genie_; the religion of Christ, he would prove, can create pa.s.sions and types of character better suited for n.o.ble imaginative treatment than those of paganism; its supernatural marvels are more than a compensation for the loss of pagan mythology.

The time chosen for his epopee in prose is the reign of the persecutor Diocletian; Rome and the provinces of the Empire, Gaul, Egypt, the deserts of the Thebaid, Jerusalem, Sparta, Athens, form only portions of the scene; heaven and h.e.l.l are open to the reader, but Chateaubriand, whose faith was rather a sentiment than a pa.s.sion, does not succeed in making his supernatural habitations and personages credible even to the fancy. Far more admirable are many of the terrestrial scenes and narrations, and among these, in particular the story of Eudore.

In the course of the travels which led him to Jerusalem, Chateaubriand had visited Spain, and it was his recollections of the Alhambra that moved him to write, about 1809, the _Aventures du Dernier des Abencerages_, published many years later. It shows a tendency towards self-restraint, excellent in itself, but not entirely in harmony with his effusive imagination. With this work Chateaubriand's inventive period of authorship closed; the rest of his life was in the main that of a politician. From the position of an unqualified royalist (1814-24) he advanced to that of a liberal, and after 1830 may be described as both royalist and republican. His pamphlet of 1814, _De Bonaparte et des Bourbons_, was declared by Louis XVIII. to be worth an army to his cause.

In his later years he published an _Essai sur la Litterature Anglaise_ and a translation of "Paradise Lost." But his chief task was the revision of the _Memoires d'Outre-Tombe_, an autobiography designed for posthumous publication, and actually issued in the pages of the _Presse_, through the indiscreet haste of the publishers, while Chateaubriand was still living. Its egotism, its vanity, its malicious wit, its fierce reprisals on those whom the writer regarded as his enemies, its many beauties, its brilliance of style, make it an exposure of all that was worst and much of what was best in his character and genius. Tended by his old friend Mme. Recamier, to whom, if to any one, he was sincerely attached, Chateaubriand died in the summer of 1848. His tomb is on the rocky islet of Grand-Be, off the coast of Brittany.

Chateaubriand cannot be loved, and his character cannot be admired without grave reserves. But an unique genius, developed at a fortunate time, enabled him to play a most significant part in the history of literature. He was the greatest of landscape painters; he restored to art the sentiment of religion; he interpreted the romantic melancholy of the age. If he posed magnificently, there were native impulses which suggested the pose; and at times, as in the _Itineraire_, the pose is entirely forgotten. His range of ideas is not extraordinary; but vision, imagination, and the pa.s.sion which makes the imaginative power its instrument, were his in a supereminent degree.

CHAPTER II THE CONFLICT OF IDEAS

While the imagination of France was turning towards the romance of the Middle Ages and the art of Christianity, h.e.l.lenic scholarship was maintained by Jean-Francois Boissonade. The representative of h.e.l.lenism in modern letters was Courier, a brave but undisciplined artillery officer under Napoleon, who loved the sight of a Greek ma.n.u.script better than he loved a victory. PAUL-LOUIS COURIER DE MeRe (1772-1825) counts for nothing in the history of French thought; in the history of French letters his pamphlets remain as masterpieces of Attic grace, luminous, light and bright in narrative, easy in dialogue, of the finest irony in comment, impeccable in measure and in malice. The translator of _Daphnis and Chloe_, wearied by war and wanderings in Italy, lived under the Restoration among his vines at Veretz, in Touraine. In 1816 he became the advocate of provincial popular rights against the vexations of the Royalist reaction. He is a vine-dresser, a rustic bourgeois, occupied with affairs of the parish. Shall Chambord be purchased for the Duke of Burgundy? shall an intolerant young _cure_ forbid the villagers to dance? shall magistrates hara.s.s the humble folk? Such are the questions agitating the country-side, which the vine-dresser Courier will resolve. The questions have been replaced to-day by others; but nothing has quite replaced the _Simple Discours_, the _Pet.i.tion pour les Villageois_, the _Pamphlet des Pamphlets_, in which the ease of the best sixteenth and seventeenth century prose is united with a deft rapier-play like that of Voltaire, and with the lucidity of the writer's cla.s.sical models.

Chateaubriand's artistic and sentimental Catholicism was the satisfaction of imaginative cravings. When JOSEPH DE MAISTRE (1753-1821) revolted against the eighteenth century, it was a revolt of the soul; when he a.s.sailed the authority of the individual reason, it was in the name of a higher reason. Son of the President of the Senate of Savoy, he saw his country invaded by the French Republican soldiery in 1792, and he retired to Lausanne. He protested against the Revolutionary aggression in his _Lettres d'un Royaliste Savoisien_; inspired by the mystical Saint-Martin, in his _Considerations sur la France_, he interpreted the meaning of the great political cataclysm as the Divine judgment upon France--a.s.signed by G.o.d the place of the leader of Christendom, the eldest daughter of the Church--for her faithlessness and proud self-will. The sacred chastis.e.m.e.nt accomplished, monarchy and Catholicism must be restored to an intact and regenerated country. During fifteen years Maistre served the King of Sardinia as envoy and plenipotentiary at the Russian Court, maintaining his dignity in cruel distress upon the salary of a clerk. Amiable in his private life, he was remorseless--with the stern charity of an inquisitor--in dogma. In a style of extraordinary clearness and force he expounded a system of ideas, logically connected, on which to base a complete reorganisation of European society. Those ideas are set forth most powerfully in the dialogues ent.i.tled _Les Soirees de Saint-Petersbourg_ and the treatises _Du Pape_ and _De l'eglise Gallicane_.

He honours reason; not the individual reason, source of innumerable errors, but the general reason, which, emanating from G.o.d, reveals universal and immutable truth--_quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus_. To commence philosophising we should despise the philosophers. Of these, Bacon, to whose errors Maistre devotes a special study, is the most dangerous; Locke is the most contemptible.

The eighteenth century spoke of nature; Maistre speaks of G.o.d, the Grand Monarch who rules His worlds by laws which are flexible in His hands. To punish is the prime duty of authority; the great Justiciary avenges Himself on the whole offending race of men; there is no government without an executioner. But G.o.d is pitiful, and allows us the refuge of prayer and sacrifice. Without religion there is no society; without the Catholic Church there is no religion; without the sovereign Pontiff there is no Catholic Church. The sovereignty of the Pope is therefore the keystone of civilisation; his it is to give and take away the crowns of kings. Governments absolute over the people, the Pontiff absolute over governments--such is the earthly reflection of the Divine monarchy in heaven. To suppose that men can begin the world anew from a Revolutionary year One, is the folly of private reason; society is an organism which grows under providential laws; revolutions are the expiation for sins. Such are the ideas which Maistre bound together in serried logic, and deployed with the mastery of an intellectual tactician. The recoil from individualism to authority could not have found a more absolute expression.

The Vicomte de Bonald (1754-1840), whose theocratic views have much in common with those of Maistre, and of his teacher Saint-Martin, dwelt on the necessity of language as a condition of thought, and maintained that language is of divine origin. Ballanche (1776-1847), half poet, half philosopher, connected theocratic ideas with a theory of human progress--a social and political palingenesis--which had in it the elements of political liberalism. Theocracy and liberalism met in the genius of FeLICITe-ROBERT DE LAMENNAIS (1782-1854); they engaged after a time in conflict, and in the end the victory lay with his democratic sympathies. A Breton and a priest, Lamennais, endowed with imagination, pa.s.sion, and eloquence, was more a prophet than a priest. He saw the world around him perishing through lack of faith; religion alone could give it life and health; a Church, freed from political shackles, in harmony with popular tendencies, governed by the sovereign Pontiff, might animate the world anew. The voice of the Catholic Church is the voice of humanity, uttering the general reason of mankind. When the _Essai sur l'Indifference en Matiere de Religion_ appeared, another Bossuet seemed to have arisen. But was a democratic Catholicism possible? Lamennais trusted that it might be so, and as the motto of the journal _L'Avenir_ (1830), in which Lacordaire and Montalembert were his fellow-labourers, he chose the words _Dieu et Liberte_.

The orthodoxy of the _Avenir_ was suspected. Lamennais, with his friends, journeyed to Rome "to consult the Lord in Shiloh," and in the _Affaires de Rome_ recorded his experiences. The Encyclical of 1832 p.r.o.nounced against the doctrines dearest to his heart and conscience; he bowed in submission, yet he could not abandon his inmost convictions. His hopes for a democratic theocracy failing, he still trusted in the peoples. But the democracy of his desire and faith was one not devoted to material interests; to spiritualise the democracy became henceforth his aim. In the _Paroles d'un Croyant_ he announced in rhythmical prose his apocalyptic visions. "It is,"

said a contemporary, "a _bonnet rouge_ planted on a cross." In his elder years Lamennais believed in a spiritual power, a common thought, a common will directing society, as the soul directs the body, but, like the soul, invisible. His metaphysics, in which it is attempted to give a scientific interpretation and application to the doctrine of the Trinity, are set forth in the _Esquisse d'une Philosophie_.

His former a.s.sociates, Lacordaire, the eloquent Dominican, and Montalembert, the historian, learned and romantic, of Western monasticism, remained faithful children of the Church. Lamennais, no less devout in spirit than they, died insubmissive, and above his grave, among the poor of Pere-Lachaise, no cross was erected.

The antagonism to eighteenth-century thought a.s.sumed other forms than those of the theocratic school. VICTOR COUSIN (1792-1867), a pupil of Maine de Biran and Royer-Collard, became at the age of twenty-three a lecturer on philosophy at the Sorbonne. He was enthusiastic, ambitious, eloquent; with scanty knowledge he spoke as one having authority, and impressed his hearers with the force of a ruling personality. Led on from Scotch to German philosophy, and having the advantage of personal acquaintance with Hegel, he advanced through psychology to metaphysics. Not in the senses but in the reason, impersonal in its spontaneous activity, he recognised the source of absolute truth; in the first act of consciousness are disclosed the finite, the infinite, and their mutual relations. In the history of philosophy, in its four great systems of sensationalism, idealism, scepticism, mysticism, he recognised the substance of philosophy itself undergoing the process of evolution; each system is true in what it affirms, false in what it denies. With psychology as a starting-point, and eclecticism as a method, Cousin attempted to establish a spiritualist doctrine. A young leader in the domain of thought, he became at a later time too imperious a ruler. In the writings of his disciple and friend THeODORE JOUFFROY (1796-1842) there is a deeper accent of reality. Doubting, and contending with his doubts, Jouffroy brooded upon the destiny of man, made inquisition into the problems of psychology, refusing to identify mental science with physiology, and applied his remarkable powers of patient and searching thought to the solution of questions in morals and aesthetics.

The school of Cousin has been named eclectic; it should rather be named spiritualist. The tendencies to which it owed its origin extended beyond philosophy, and are apparent in the literary art of Cousin's contemporaries.

As a basis for social reconstruction the spiritualist philosophy was ineffectual. Another school of thought issuing from the Revolution, yet opposing its anarchic individualism, aspired to regenerate society by the application of the principles of positive science.

CLAUDE-HENRI DE SAINT-SIMON (1760-1825), and FRANcOIS-CHARLES FOURIER (1772-1837), differing in many of their opinions, have a common distinction as the founders of modern socialism.

Saint-Simon's ideal was that of a State controlled in things of the mind by men of science, and in material affairs by the captains of industry. The aim of society should be the exploitation of the globe by a.s.sociative effort. In his _Nouveau Christianisme_ he thought to deliver the Christian religion from the outworn superst.i.tion, as he regarded it, alike of Catholicism and Protestantism, and to point out its true principle as adapted to our nineteenth century--that of human charity, the united effort of men towards the well-being of the poorest cla.s.s.

Saint-Simon, fantastic, incoherent, deficient in the scientific spirit and in the power of co-ordinating his results, yet struck out suggestive ideas. A great and systematic thinker, AUGUSTE COMTE (1798-1857), who was a.s.sociated with Saint-Simon from 1817 to 1824, perceived the significance of these ideas, and was urged forward by them to researches properly his own. The positivism of Comte consists of a philosophy and a polity, in which a religion is involved. The quickening of his emotional nature through an adoring friendship with Mme. Clotilde de Vaux, made him sensible of the incompleteness of his earlier efforts at an intellectual reconstruction; he felt the need of worship and of love. Comte's philosophy proceeds from the theory that all human conceptions advance from the primitive theological state, through the metaphysical--when abstract forces, occult causes, scholastic ent.i.ties are invented to explain the phenomena of nature--to the positive, when at length it is recognised that human knowledge cannot pa.s.s beyond the region of phenomena. With these stages corresponds the progress of society from militarism, aggressive or defensive, to industrialism. The several abstract sciences--those dealing with the laws of phenomena rather than with the application of laws--are so arranged by Comte as to exhibit each more complex science resting on a simpler, to which it adds a new order of truths; the whole erection, ascending to the science of sociology, which includes a dynamical as well as a statical doctrine of human society--a doctrine of the laws of progress as well as of the laws of order--is crowned by morals.

In the polity of positivism the supreme spiritual power is entrusted to a priesthood of science. Their moral influence will be chiefly directed to reinforcing the social feeling, altruism, as against the predominance of self-love. The object of religious reverence is not G.o.d, but the "Great Being"--Humanity, the society of the n.o.ble living and the n.o.ble dead, the company, or rather the unity, of all those who contribute to the better life of man. To Humanity we pay our vows, we yield our grat.i.tude, we render our homage, we direct our aspirations; for Humanity we act and live in the blessed subordination of egoistic desire. Women--the mother, the wife, the daughter--purifying through affection the energies of man, act, under the Great Being, as angelic guardians, accomplishing a moral providence.

Comte's theory of the three states, theological, metaphysical, and positive, was accepted by PIERRE JOSEPH PROUDHON (1809-65), a far more brilliant writer, a far less constructive thinker, and aided him in arriving at conclusions which differ widely from those of Comte.

Son of a cooper at Besancon, Proudhon had the virtues of a true child of the people--integrity, affection, courage, zeal, untiring energy.

Religion he would replace by morality, ardent, strict, and pure. Free a.s.sociations of workmen, subject to no spiritual or temporal authority, should arise over all the land. _Qu'est-ce que la Propriete?_ he asked in the t.i.tle of a work published in 1840; and his answer was, _La Propriete c'est le Vol_. Property, seizing upon the products of labour in the form of rent or interest, and rendering no equivalent, is theft. Justice demands that service should be repaid by an equal service. Society, freely organising itself on the principles of liberty and justice, requires no government; only through such anarchy as this can true order be attained. An apostle of modern communism, Proudhon, by ideas leavening the popular mind, became no insignificant influence in practical politics.

CHAPTER III POETRY OF THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL

I

The eighteenth century did homage to the reason; it sought for general truths, scientific, social, political; its art was in the main an inheritance, diminished with lapse of time, from the cla.s.sical art of the preceding century. With Rousseau came an outburst of the personal element in literature, an overflow of sensibility, an enfranchis.e.m.e.nt of the pa.s.sions, and of imagination as connected with the pa.s.sions; his eloquence has in it the lyrical note. The romantic movement was an a.s.sertion of freedom for the imagination, and an a.s.sertion of the rights of individuality. Love, wonder, hope, measureless desire, strange fears, infinite sadness, the sentiment of nature, aspiration towards G.o.d, were born anew. Imagination, claiming authority, refused to submit to the rules of cla.s.sic art.

Why should the several literary species be impounded each in its separate paddock? Let them mingle at the pleasure of the artist's genius; let the epic and the drama catch what they can of the lyric cry; let tragedy and comedy meet and mix. Why remain in servitude to the models of Greece and Rome? Let all epochs and every clime contribute to the enrichment of art. The primitive age was above all others the age of poetry. The great Christian centuries were the centuries of miracle and marvel, of spiritual exaltation and transcendent pa.s.sion. Honour, therefore, to our mediaeval forefathers! It is the part of reason to trust the imagination in the imaginative sphere. Through what is most personal and intimate we reach the truths of the universal heart of man. An image may at the same time be a symbol; behind a historical tableau may lie a philosophical idea.

At first the romantic movement was Christian and monarchical. Its a.s.sertion of freedom, its claims on behalf of the _ego_, its licence of the imagination, were in reality revolutionary. The intellect is more aristocratic than the pa.s.sions. The great spectacle of modern democracy deploying its forces is more moving than any pallid ideals of the past; it has the grandeur and breadth of the large phenomena of nature; it is wide as a sunrise; its advance is as the onset of the sea, and has like rumours of victory and defeat. The romantic movement, with no infidelity to its central principle, became modern and democratic.

Foreign life and literatures lent their aid to the romantic movement in France--the pa.s.sion and mystery of the East; the struggle for freedom in Greece; the old ballads of Spain; the mists, the solitudes, the young heroes, the pallid female forms of Ossian; the feudal splendours of Scott; the melancholy Harold; the mysterious Manfred; Goethe's champion of freedom, his victim of sensibility, his seeker for the fountains of living knowledge; Schiller's revolters against social law, and his adventurers of the court and camp.

With the renewal of imagination and sentiment came a renewal of language and of metre. The poetical diction of the eighteenth century had grown colourless and abstract; general terms had been preferred to particular; simple, direct, and vivid words had been replaced by periphrases--the c.o.c.k was "the domestic bird that announces the day."

The romantic poets sought for words--whether n.o.ble or vulgar--that were coloured, concrete, picturesque. The tendency culminated with Gautier, to whom words were valuable, like gems, for their gleam, their iridescence, and their hardness. Lost treasures of the language were recovered; at a later date new verbal inventions were made. By degrees, also, grammatical structure lost some of its rigidity; sentences and periods grew rather than were built; phrases were alive, and learnt, if there were a need, to leap and bound. Verse was moulded by the feeling that inspired it; the melodies were like those of an Eolian harp, long-drawn or retracted as the wind swept or touched the strings. Symmetry was slighted; harmony was valued for its own sake and for its spiritual significance. Rich rhymes satisfied or surprised the ear, and the poet sometimes suffered through his curiosity as a virtuoso. By internal licences--the mobile cesura, new variations and combinations--the power of the alexandrine was marvellously enlarged; it lost its monotony and became capable of every achievement; its external restraints were lightened; verse glided into verse as wave overtaking wave. The accomplishment of these changes was a gradual process, of which Hugo and Sainte-Beuve were the chief initiators. Gautier and, in his elder years, Hugo contributed to the later evolution of romantic verse. The influence on poetical form of Lamartine, Vigny, Musset, was of minor importance.

The year 1822 is memorable; it saw the appearance of Vigny's _Poemes_, the _Odes_ of Hugo, which announced a new power in literature, though the direction of that power was not yet defined, and almost to the same moment belongs the indictment of cla.s.sical literature by Henri Beyle ("Stendhal") in his study ent.i.tled _Racine et Shakespeare_.

Around Charles Nodier, in the library of the a.r.s.enal, gathered the young revolters--among them Vigny, Sainte-Beuve, emile Deschamps, afterwards the translator of _Romeo and Juliet_ and _Macbeth_, his brother Antony, afterwards the translator of the _Divine Comedy_.

The first Cenacle was formed; in the _Muse Francaise_ and in the _Globe_ the principles of the new literary school were expounded and ill.u.s.trated. Victor Hugo looked on with friendly intentions, but still held aloof.

JEAN-PIERRE DE BeRANGER (1780-1857) was not one of this company of poets. A child of Paris, of humble parentage, he discovered, after various experiments, that his part was not that of a singer of large ambitions. In 1815 his first collection of _Chansons_ appeared; the fourth appeared in 1833. Standing between the bourgeoisie and the people, he mediated between the popular and the middle-cla.s.s sentiment. His songs flew like town sparrows from garret to garden; impudent or discreet, they nested everywhere. They seemed to be the embodied wisdom of good sense, good temper, easy morals, love without its ardours, poverty without its pains, patriotism without its fatigues, a religion on familiar terms with the _Dieu des bonnes gens_.

In his elder years a Beranger legend had evolved itself; he was the sage of democracy, the Socrates of the people, the patriarch to whom pilgrims travelled to receive the oracles of liberal and benevolent philosophy. Notwithstanding his faults in the pseudo-cla.s.sic taste, Beranger was skilled in the art of popular song; he knew the virtue of concision; he knew how to evolve swiftly his little lyric drama; he knew how to wing his verses with a volant refrain; he could catch the sentiment of the moment and of the mult.i.tude; he could be gay with touches of tenderness, and smile through a tear reminiscent of departed youth and pleasure and Lisette. For the good bourgeois he was a liberal in politics and religion; for the people he was a democrat who hated the Restoration, loved equality more than liberty, and glorified the legendary Napoleon, representative of democratic absolutism. In the history of politics the songs of Beranger count for much; in the history of literature the poet has a little niche of his own, with which one may be content who, if he had not in elder years supposed himself the champion of a literary revolution, might be called modest.

II

Among the members of the Cenacle was to be seen a poet already famous, their elder by several years, who might have been the master of a school had he not preferred to dwell apart; one who, born for poetry, chose to look on verse as no more than an accident of his existence.

In the year 1820 had appeared a slender volume ent.i.tled _Meditations Poetiques_. The soul, long departed, returned in this volume to French poetry. Its publication was an event hardly less important than that of the _Genie du Christianisme_. The well-springs of pure inspiration once more flowed. The critics, indeed, were not all enthusiastic; the public, with a surer instinct, recognised in Lamartine the singer they had for many years desired, and despaired to find.

ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE, born at Macon in 1790, of royalist parents, had pa.s.sed his childhood among the tranquil fields and little hills around his homestead at Milly. From his mother he learned to love the Bible, Ta.s.so, Bernardin, and a christianised version of the Savoyard Vicar's faith; at a later time he read Chateaubriand, Rousseau, Milton, Byron, and was enchanted by the wandering gleams and glooms of Ossian. From the melancholy of youth he was roused by Italian travel, and by that Italian love romance of Graziella, the circ.u.mstances of which he has dignified for the uses of idealised autobiography. A deeper pa.s.sion of love and grief followed; Madame Charles, the "Julie" of Lamartine's _Raphael_, the "Elvire" of his _Meditations_, died. Lamartine had versified already in a manner which has affinities with that of those eighteenth-century poets and elegiac singers of the Empire whom he was to banish from public regard.

Love and grief evoked finer and purer strains; his deepest feelings flowed into verse with perfect sincerity and perfect spontaneity.

Without an effort of the will he had become the most ill.u.s.trious poet of France.

Lamartine had held and had resigned a soldier's post in the body-guard of Louis XVIII. He now accepted the position of attache to the emba.s.sy at Naples; published in 1823 his _Nouvelles Meditations_, and two years later _Le Dernier Chant du Pelerinage d'Harold_ (Byron's Childe Harold); after which followed a long silence. Secretary in 1824 to the legation at Florence, he abandoned after a time the diplomatic career, and on the eve of the Revolution of July (1830) appeared again as a poet in his _Harmonies Poetiques et Religieuses_; travelled in the East in company with his wife, and recorded his impressions in the _Voyage en Orient_; entered into political life, at first a solitary in politics as he had been in literature, but by degrees finding himself drawn more and more towards democratic ideas. "Where will you sit?" he was asked on his presentation in the Chamber. His smiling reply, "On the ceiling," was symbolical of the fact; but from "the ceiling" his exalted oratory, generous in temper, sometimes wise and well informed, descended with influence. _Jocelyn_ (1836), _La Chute d'un Ange_ (1838), the _Recueillements Poetiques_ (1839), closed the series of his poetical works, though he did not wholly cease from song.

In 1847 Lamartine's idealising _Histoire des Girondins_, brilliant in its romantic portraiture, had the importance of a political event.

The Revolution of February placed him for a little time at the head of affairs; as he had been the soul of French poetry, so for a brief hour he was the soul of the political life of France. With the victory of imperialism Lamartine retired into the shade. He was more than sixty years of age; he had lost his fortune and was burdened with debt. His elder years were occupied with incessant improvisations for the booksellers--histories, biographies, tales, criticism, autobiographic confidences flowed from his pen. It was a gallant struggle and a sad one. Through the delicate generosity of Napoleon III. he was at length relieved without humiliating concessions. In 1869 Lamartine died in his eightieth year.

He was a n.o.ble dreamer in practical affairs, and just ideas formed a portion of his dreams. Nature had made him an irreclaimable optimist; all that is base and ugly in life pa.s.sed out of view as he soared above earth in his luminous ether. Sadness and doubt indeed he knew, but his sadness had a charm of its own, and there were consolations in maternal nature, in love, in religious faith and adoration. His power of vision was not intense or keen; his descriptions are commonly vague or pale; but no one could mirror more faithfully a state of feeling divested of all material circ.u.mstance.

The pure and ample harmonies of his verse do not attack the ear, but they penetrate to the soul. All the great lyric themes--G.o.d, nature, death, glory, melancholy, solitude, regret, desire, hope, love--he interpreted on his instrument with a musician's inspiration.

Unhappily he lacked the steadfast force of will, the inexhaustible patience, which go to make a complete artist; he improvised admirably; he refused to labour as a master of technique; hence his diffuseness, his negligences; hence the decline of his powers after the first spontaneous inspiration was exhausted.

Lamartine may have equalled but he never surpa.s.sed the best poems of his earliest volume. But the elegiac singer aspired to be a philosophic poet, and, infusing his ideas into sentiment and narrative, became the author of _Jocelyn_ and _La Chute d'un Ange_.

Recalling and idealising an episode in the life of his friend the Abbe Dumont, he tells how Jocelyn, a child of humble parents--not yet a priest--takes shelter among the mountains from the Revolutionary terror; how a proscribed youth, Laurence, becomes his companion; how Laurence is found to be a girl; how friendship pa.s.ses into love; how, in order that he may receive the condemned bishop's last confession, Jocelyn submits to become a priest; how the lovers part; how Laurence wanders into piteous ways of pa.s.sion; how Jocelyn attends her in her dying hours, and lays her body among the hills and streams of their early love. It is Jocelyn who chronicles events and feelings in his journal of joy and of sorrow. Lamartine acknowledges that he had before him as a model the idyl dear to him in childhood--Bernardin's _Paul et Virginie_.

The poem is complete in itself, but it was designed as a fragment of that vast modern epopee, with humanity for the hero, of which _La Chute d'un Ange_ was another fragment. The later poem, vast in dimensions, fantastic in subject, negligent in style, is a work of Lamartine's poetic decline. We are among the mountains of Lebanon, where dwell the descendants of Cain. The angel, enamoured of the maiden Dadha, becomes human. Through gigantic and incoherent inventions looms the idea of humanity which degrades itself by subjugation to the senses, as in _Jocelyn_ we had seen the type of humanity which ascends by virtue of aspirations of the soul. It was a poor jest to say that the t.i.tle of his poem _La Chute d'un Ange_ described its author. Lamartine had failed; he could not handle so vast a subject with plastic power; but in earlier years he had accomplished enough to justify us in disregarding a late failure--he had brought back the soul to poetry.

III