French Classics Part 30

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 pa.s.sed 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 sh.e.l.l unfolds, And life is music all, and love, and prime.

Pa.s.sing 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 enn.o.bled, like Ulysses transfigured by Pallas-Athene. His women are beautiful as houris fresh from paradise. The aspects of ocean and sh.o.r.e 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 pa.s.s.

"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 G.o.d 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 a.s.sures 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 impa.s.sioned 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 pa.s.sion 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 G.o.d'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 G.o.d 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, sanct.i.ty, and purity that G.o.d 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 ingrat.i.tude 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!

XXIII.

THE GROUP OF 1830.

VICTOR HUGO: 1802-1885; SAINTE-BEUVE: 1804-1869; BALZAC: 1799-1850; GEORGE SAND: 1804-1876; DE MUSSET: 1810-1857.

As a convenient method of inclusion and condensation for a number of authors who must by no means be omitted, but for whom there is left little room in these pages, we adopt the plan of making a cl.u.s.ter of important names to be treated in a single chapter. The political and the literary history of France join a sort of synchronism with one another at a certain point of time, which makes this arrangement not only feasible but natural.

The accession of Louis Philippe to the throne of France and the first representation of Victor Hugo's "Hernani" in Paris both occurred in the year 1830. The Bourbon or absolutist tradition in French politics and the cla.s.sic tradition in French letters were thus at one and the same moment decisively interrupted. For, as in the commencing reign of Louis Philippe, the "Citizen King" of France, the French people became for the first time, under monarchical rule, a recognized estate in the realm, so, with the triumph of Victor Hugo's "Hernani" on the stage, the hour may be said to have struck of culmination in splendor and in influence for the romantic movement in French literature. The dominance of the ideas indicated in the expression "the Romantic Movement" was then suddenly for the moment so overwhelming and so wide that it amounted almost to a usurpation of letters in France. We might indeed have written "The French Romanticists" as a fairly good alternative t.i.tle to the present chapter.

1. VICTOR HUGO.

The men of 1830--we thus use a designation which has come to be established in French literary history--began each man his career in letters as a fighting romanticist. Victor Hugo was the acknowledged Achilles of the fight. Whoever wavered backward, Victor Hugo clamped his feet for his lifetime on the bridge of war, where his plume nodded defiance, seeming still to say for its wearer standing with a cliff of adamant at his back,

Come one, come all, this rock shall fly From its firm base as soon as I.

Around Victor Hugo, as the towering central figure among them all, were mustered, though some of them not to remain in this comradeship with him, Sainte-Beuve, Balzac, George Sand, De Musset. There were others than these, but these shall for us here const.i.tute the group of 1830.

We shall be in yet better accord with Victor Hugo's estimate of himself, if we take for his symbol a being mightier even than a demiG.o.d like Achilles. Let us do so and call him a t.i.tan. But the past tense half seems an anachronism in speaking of Victor Hugo. The earth still trembles to his retiring footsteps and to the portentous reaction of his wrestle in war with the G.o.ds. This is his glory--he fought against Olympus, and, if he did not overthrow, at least he was not overthrown.

Olympus in our parable was cla.s.sicism in power; Victor Hugo was the genius of insurgent romanticism.

We thus repeat yet again terms which it would be difficult precisely to define. Cla.s.sicism and romanticism are two forces in literature, seemingly opposed to each other, which, however, need to be compounded and reconciled in a single resultant, in order to the true highest effect from either. For neither cla.s.sicism nor romanticism alone concludes the ultimate theory of literature.

Cla.s.sicism criticises; romanticism creates. Cla.s.sicism enjoins self-control; romanticism encourages self-indulgence. Cla.s.sicism is mold; romanticism is matter. Cla.s.sicism is art; romanticism is nature.

Cla.s.sicism is law; romanticism is life. Romanticism is undoubtedly first and indispensable; but so, not less, cla.s.sicism is indispensable, though second. Neither, in short, can get along without the other. But Victor Hugo represents romanticism.