The best work on Lāmāism is still Köppen’sDie Lamaische Hierarchie und Kirche(Berlin, 1859). See also Bushell, “The Early History of Tibet,” in theJournal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1879-1880, vol. xii.; Sanang Setzen’sHistory of the East Mongols(in Mongolian, translated into German by J. Schmidt,Geschichte der Ost-Mongolen); “Analyse du Kandjur,” by M. Léon Feer, inAnnales du Musée Gaimet(1881); Schott,Ueber den Buddhismus in Hoch-Asien; Gutzlaff,Geschichte des Chinesischen Reiches; Hue and Gabet,Souvenirs d’un voyage dans la Tartarie, le Tibet, et la Chine(Paris, 1858); Pallas’sSammlung historischer Nachrichten über die Mongolischen Völkerschaften; Bābu Sarat Chunder Das’s “Contributions on the Religion and History of Tibet,” in theJournal of the Bengal Asiatic Society, 1881; L. A. Waddell,The Buddhism of Tibet(London, 1895); A. H. Francke,History of Western Tibet(London, 1907); A. Grünwedel,Mythologie des Buddhismus in Tibet und der Mongolei(Berlin, 1900).
The best work on Lāmāism is still Köppen’sDie Lamaische Hierarchie und Kirche(Berlin, 1859). See also Bushell, “The Early History of Tibet,” in theJournal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1879-1880, vol. xii.; Sanang Setzen’sHistory of the East Mongols(in Mongolian, translated into German by J. Schmidt,Geschichte der Ost-Mongolen); “Analyse du Kandjur,” by M. Léon Feer, inAnnales du Musée Gaimet(1881); Schott,Ueber den Buddhismus in Hoch-Asien; Gutzlaff,Geschichte des Chinesischen Reiches; Hue and Gabet,Souvenirs d’un voyage dans la Tartarie, le Tibet, et la Chine(Paris, 1858); Pallas’sSammlung historischer Nachrichten über die Mongolischen Völkerschaften; Bābu Sarat Chunder Das’s “Contributions on the Religion and History of Tibet,” in theJournal of the Bengal Asiatic Society, 1881; L. A. Waddell,The Buddhism of Tibet(London, 1895); A. H. Francke,History of Western Tibet(London, 1907); A. Grünwedel,Mythologie des Buddhismus in Tibet und der Mongolei(Berlin, 1900).
(T. W. R. D.)
1Watters’sYūan Chwāng, edited by Rhys Davids and Bushell, i. 210, 356, 271.2Published with facsimile and translation and notes in theJournal of the Royal Asiatic Societyfor 1879-1880, vol. xii.3This statement representing the substantial and historical position, is retained, in spite of the crises of March 1910, when the Dalai Lāma took refuge from the Chinese in India, and of 1904, when the British expedition occupied Lhasa and the Dalai Lāma fled to China (seeTibet).
1Watters’sYūan Chwāng, edited by Rhys Davids and Bushell, i. 210, 356, 271.
2Published with facsimile and translation and notes in theJournal of the Royal Asiatic Societyfor 1879-1880, vol. xii.
3This statement representing the substantial and historical position, is retained, in spite of the crises of March 1910, when the Dalai Lāma took refuge from the Chinese in India, and of 1904, when the British expedition occupied Lhasa and the Dalai Lāma fled to China (seeTibet).
LAMALOU-LES-BAINS,a watering-place of southern France in the department of Hérault, 53½ m. W. of Montpellier by rail, in a valley of the southern Cévennes. Pop. (1906) 720. The waters, which are both hot and cold, are used in cases of rheumatism, sciatica, locomotor ataxy and nervous maladies.
LAMA-MIAO,orDolon-nor, a city of the province of Chih-li, China, 150 m. N. of Peking, in a barren sandy plain watered by the Urtingol, a tributary of the Shang-tu-ko. The town proper, almost exclusively occupied by Chinese, is about a mile in length by half a mile in breadth, has narrow and dirty streets, and contains a population of about 26,000. Unlike the ordinary Chinese town of the same rank, it is not walled. A busy trade is carried on between the Chinese and the Mongolians, who bring in their cattle, sheep, camels, hides and wool to barter for tea, tobacco, cotton and silk. At some distance from the Chinese town lies the Mongolian quarter, with two groups of lama temples and villages occupied by about 2300 priests. Dr Williamson (Journeys in North China, 1870) described the chief temple as a huge oblong building with an interior not unlike a Gothic church. Lama-miao is the seat of a manufactory of bronze idols and other articles of ritual, which find their way to all parts of Mongolia and Tibet. The craftsmen work in their own houses.
LAMAR, LUCIUS QUINTUS CINCINNATUS(1825-1893), American statesman and judge, was born at the old “Lamar Homestead,” in Putnam county, Georgia, on the 17th of September 1825. His father, Lucius Q. C. Lamar (1797-1834), was an able lawyer, a judge of the superior court of Georgia, and the compiler of theLaws of Georgia from 1810 to 1819(1821). In 1845 young Lamar graduated from Emory College (Oxford, Ga.), and in 1847 was admitted to the bar. In 1849 he removed to Oxford, Mississippi, and in 1850-1852 was adjunct professor of mathematics in the state university. In 1852 he removed to Covington, Ga., to practise law, and in 1853 was elected a member of the Georgia House of Representatives. In 1855 he returned to Mississippi, and two years later became a member of the National House of Representatives, where he served until December 1860, when he withdrew to become a candidate for election to the “secession” convention of Mississippi. He was elected to the convention, and drafted for it the Mississippi ordinance of secession. In the summer of 1860 he had accepted an appointment to the chair of ethics and metaphysics in the university of Mississippi, but, having been appointed a lieutenant-colonel in the Confederate Army in the spring of 1861, he resigned his professorship. The colonel of his regiment (Nineteenth Mississippi) was killed early in the battle of Williamsburg, on the 5th of May 1862, and the command then fell to Lamar, but in October he resigned from the army. In November 1862 he was appointed by President Jefferson Davis special commissioner of the Confederacy to Russia; but he did not proceed farther than Paris, and his mission was soon terminated by the refusal of the Confederate Senate to confirm his appointment. In 1866 he was again appointed to the chair of ethics and metaphysics in the university of Mississippi, and in the next year was transferred to the chair of law, but in 1870, Republicans having become trustees of the university upon the readmission of the state into the Union, he resigned. From 1873 to 1877 he was again a Democratic representative in Congress; from 1877 to 1885 he was a United States senator; from 1885 to January 1888 he was secretary of the interior; and from 1888 until his death at Macon, Ga., on the 23rd of January 1893, he was an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. In Congress Lamar fought the silver and greenback craze and argued forcibly against the protective tariff; in the department of the interior he introduced various reforms; and on the Supreme Court bench his dissenting opinion in theNeagle Case(based upon a denial that certain powers belonging to Congress, but not exercised, were by implication vested in the department of justice) is famous. But he is perhaps best known for the part he took after the Civil War in helping to effect a reconciliation between the North and the South. During the early secession movement he strove to arouse the white people of the South from their indifference, declaring that secession alone could save them from a doom similar to that of the former whites of San Domingo. He probably never changed his convictions as to the righteousness of the “lost cause”; but he accepted the result of the war as a final settlement of the differences leading to it, and strove to restore the South in the Union, and to effect the reunion of the nation in feeling as well as in government. This is in part seen from such speeches as his eulogy on Charles Sumner (27th of April 1874), his leadership in reorganizing the Democraticparty of his own state, and his counsels of peace in the disputed presidential election of 1876.
See Edward Mayes,Lucius Q. C. Lamar: His Life, Times and Speeches(Nashville, Tenn., 1896).
See Edward Mayes,Lucius Q. C. Lamar: His Life, Times and Speeches(Nashville, Tenn., 1896).
LAMARCK, JEAN BAPTISTE PIERRE ANTOINE DE MONET,Chevalier de(1744-1829), French naturalist, was born on the 1st of August 1744, at Bazantin, a village of Picardy. He was an eleventh child; and his father, lord of the manor and of old family, but of limited means, having placed three sons in the army, destined this one for the church, and sent him to the Jesuits at Amiens, where he continued till his father’s death. After this he would remain with the Jesuits no longer, and, not yet seventeen years of age, started for the seat of war at Bergen-op-Zoom, before which place one of his brothers had already been killed. Mounted on an old horse, with a boy from the village as attendant, and furnished by a lady with a letter of introduction to a colonel, he reached his destination on the evening before a battle. Next morning the colonel found that the new and very diminutive volunteer had posted himself in the front rank of a body of grenadiers, and could not be induced to quit the position. In the battle, the company which he had joined became exposed to the fire of the enemy’s artillery, and in the confusion of retreat was forgotten. All the officers and subalterns were killed, and not more than fourteen men were left, when the oldest grenadiers seeing there were no more French in sight proposed to the young volunteer so soon become commandant to withdraw his men. This he refused to do without orders. These at last arrived; and for his bravery he was made an officer on the spot, and soon after was named to a lieutenancy.
After the peace, the regiment was sent to Monaco. There one of his comrades playfully lifted him by the head, and to this it was imputed that he was seized with disease of the glands of the neck, so severe as to put a stop to his military career. He went to Paris and began the study of medicine, supporting himself by working in a banker’s office. He early became interested in meteorology and in physical and chemical speculations of a chimerical kind, but happily threw his main strength into botany, and in 1778 published hisFlore française, a work in which by a dichotomous system of contrasting characters he enabled the student with facility to determine species. This work, which went through several editions and long kept the field, gained for its author immediate popularity as well as admission to the Academy of Sciences.
In 1781 and 1782, under the title of botanist to the king, an appointment obtained for him by Buffon, whose son accompanied him, he travelled through various countries of Europe, extending his knowledge of natural history; and on his return he began those elaborate contributions to botany on which his reputation in that science principally rests, namely, theDictionnaire de Botaniqueand theIllustrations de Genres, voluminous works contributed to theEncyclopédie Méthodique(1785). In 1793, in consequence of changes in the organization of the natural history department at the Jardin du Roi, where he had held a botanical appointment since 1788, Lamarck was presented to a zoological chair, and called on to lecture on theInsectaandVermesof Linnaeus, the animals for which he introduced the termInvertebrata. Thus driven, comparatively late in life, to devote his principal attention to zoology instead of botany, he had the misfortune soon after to suffer from impaired vision; and the malady resulted subsequently in total blindness. Yet his greatest zoological work, theHistoire naturelle des animaux sans vertèbres, was published from 1815 to 1822, with the assistance, in the last two volumes, of his eldest daughter and of P. A. Latreille (1762-1833). A volume of plates of the fossil shells of the neighbourhood of Paris was collected in 1823 from his memoirs in theAnnales des Muséums. He died on the 18th of December 1829.
The character of Lamarck as a naturalist is remarkable alike for its excellences and its defects. His excellences were width of scope, fertility of ideas and a pre-eminent faculty of precise description, arising not only from a singularly terse style, but from a clear insight into both the distinctive features and the resemblances of forms. That part of his zoological work which constitutes his solid claim to the highest honour as a zoologist is to be found in his extensive and detailed labours in the departments of living and fossilInvertebrata. His endeavours at classification of the great groups were necessarily defective on account of the imperfect knowledge possessed in his time in regard to many of them,e.g.echinoderms, ascidians and intestinal worms; yet they are not without interest, particularly on account of the comprehensive attempt to unite in one great division asArticulataall those groups that appeared to present a segmented construction. Moreover, Lamarck was the first to distinguish vertebrate from invertebrate animals by the presence of a vertebral column, and among the Invertebrata to found the groupsCrustacea,ArachnidaandAnnelida. In 1785 (Hist. del’ Acad.) he evinced his appreciation of the necessity of natural orders in botany by an attempt at the classification of plants, interesting, though crude and falling immeasurably short of the system which grew in the hands of his intimate friend A. L. de Jussieu. The problem of taxonomy has never been put more philosophically than he subsequently put it in hisAnimaux sans vertèbres: “What arrangement must be given to the general distribution of animals to make it conformable to the order of nature in the production of these beings?”
The most prominent defect in Lamarck must be admitted to have been want of control in speculation. Doubtless the speculative tendency furnished a powerful incentive to work, but it outran the legitimate deductions from observation, and led him into the production of volumes of worthless chemistry without experimental basis, as well as into spending much time on fruitless meteorological predictions. HisAnnuaires Météorologiqueswere published yearly from 1800 to 1810, and were not discontinued until after an unnecessarily public and brutal tirade from Napoleon, administered on the occasion of being presented with one of his works on natural history.
To the general reader the name of Lamarck is chiefly interesting on account of his theory of the origin of life and of the diversities of animal forms. The idea, which appears to have been favoured by Buffon before him, that species were not through all time unalterable, and that the more complex might have been developed from pre-existent simpler forms, became with Lamarck a belief or, as he imagined, a demonstration. Spontaneous generation, he considered, might be easily conceived as resulting from such agencies as heat and electricity causing in small gelatinous bodies an utricular structure, and inducing a “singular tension,” a kind of “éréthisme” or “orgasme”; and, having thus accounted for the first appearance of life, he explained the whole organization of animals and formation of different organs by four laws (introduction to hisHistoire naturelle des animaux sans vertèbres, 1815):—
1. “Life by its proper forces tends continually to increase the volume of every body possessing it, and to enlarge its parts, up to a limit which it brings about.2. “The production of a new organ in an animal body results from the supervention of a new want (besoin) continuing to make itself felt, and a new movement which this want gives birth to and encourages.3. “The development of organs and their force of action are constantly in ratio to the employment of these organs.4. “All which has been acquired, laid down, or changed in the organization of individuals in the course of their life is conserved by generation and transmitted to the new individuals which proceed from those which have undergone those changes.”
1. “Life by its proper forces tends continually to increase the volume of every body possessing it, and to enlarge its parts, up to a limit which it brings about.
2. “The production of a new organ in an animal body results from the supervention of a new want (besoin) continuing to make itself felt, and a new movement which this want gives birth to and encourages.
3. “The development of organs and their force of action are constantly in ratio to the employment of these organs.
4. “All which has been acquired, laid down, or changed in the organization of individuals in the course of their life is conserved by generation and transmitted to the new individuals which proceed from those which have undergone those changes.”
The second law is often referred to as Lamarck’s hypothesis of the evolution of organs in animals by appetence or longing, although he does not teach that the animal’s desires affect its conformation directly, but that altered wants lead to altered habits, which result in the formation of new organs as well as in modification, growth or dwindling of those previously existing. Thus, he suggests that, ruminants being pursued by carnivora, their legs have grown slender; and, their legs being only fit for support, while their jaws are weak, they have made attack with the crown of the head, and the determination of fluids thither has led to the growth of horns. So also the stretching of the giraffe’s neck to reach the foliage he supposes to have ledto its elongation; and the kangaroo, sitting upright to support the young in its pouch, he imagines to have had its fore-limbs dwarfed by disuse, and its hind legs and tail exaggerated by using them in leaping. The fourth law expresses the inheritance of acquired characters, which is denied by August Weismann and his followers. For a more detailed account of Lamarck’s place in the history of the doctrine of evolution, seeEvolution.
LA MARGHERITA, CLEMENTE SOLARO,Count del(1792-1869), Piedmontese statesman, was born at Mondovi. He studied law at Siena and Turin, but Piedmont was at that time under French domination, and being devoted to the house of Savoy he refused to take his degree, as this proceeding would have obliged him to recognize the authority of the usurper; after the restoration of the Sardinian kingdom, however, he graduated. In 1816 he entered the diplomatic service. Later he returned to Turin, and succeeded in gaining the confidence and esteem of King Charles Albert, who in 1835 appointed him minister of foreign affairs. A fervent Roman Catholic, devoted to the pope and to the Jesuits, friendly to Austria and firmly attached to the principles of autocracy, he strongly opposed every attempt at political innovation, and was in consequence bitterly hated by the liberals. When the popular agitation in favour of constitutional reform first broke out the king felt obliged to dispense with La Margherita’s services, although he had conducted public affairs with considerable ability and absolute loyalty, even upholding the dignity of the kingdom in the face of the arrogant attitude of the cabinet of Vienna. He expounded his political creed and his policy as minister to Charles Albert (from February 1835 to October 1847) in hisMemorandum storico-politico, published in 1851, a document of great interest for the study of the conditions of Piedmont and Italy at that time. In 1853 he was elected deputy for San Quirico, but he persisted in regarding his mandate as derived from the royal authority rather than as an emanation of the popular will. As leader of the Clerical Right in the parliament he strongly opposed Cavour’s policy, which was eventually to lead to Italian unity, and on the establishment of the kingdom of Italy he retired from public life.
LA MARMORA, ALFONSO FERRERO(1804-1878), Italian general and statesman, was born at Turin on the 18th of November 1804. He entered the Sardinian army in 1823, and was a captain in March 1848, when he gained distinction and the rank of major at the siege of Peschiera. On the 5th of August 1848 he liberated Charles Albert, king of Sardinia, from the Milan revolutionaries, and in October was promoted general and appointed minister of war. After suppressing the revolt of Genoa in 1849, he again assumed in November 1849 the portfolio of war, which, save during the period of his command of the Crimean expedition, he retained until 1859. Having reconstructed the Piedmontese army, he took part in the war of 1859 against Austria; and in July of that year succeeded Cavour in the premiership. In 1860 he was sent to Berlin and St Petersburg to arrange for the recognition of the kingdom of Italy, and subsequently he held the offices of governor of Milan and royal lieutenant at Naples, until, in September 1864, he succeeded Minghetti as premier. In this capacity he modified the scope of the September Convention by a note in which he claimed for Italy full freedom of action in respect of national aspirations to the possession of Rome, a document of which Visconti Venosta afterwards took advantage when justifying the Italian occupation of Rome in 1870. In April 1866 La Marmora concluded an alliance with Prussia against Austria, and, on the outbreak of war in June, took command of an army corps, but was defeated at Custozza on the 23rd of June. Accused of treason by his fellow-countrymen, and of duplicity by the Prussians, he eventually published in defence of his tactics (1873) a series of documents entitledUn po’ più di luce sugli eventi dell’ anno1866 (More light on the events of 1866) a step which caused irritation in Germany, and exposed him to the charge of having violated state secrets. Meanwhile he had been sent to Paris in 1867 to oppose the French expedition to Rome, and in 1870, after the occupation of Rome by the Italians, had been appointed lieutenant-royal of the new capital. He died at Florence on the 5th of January 1878. La Marmora’s writings includeUn episodio del risorgimento italiano(Florence, 1875); andI segreti di stato nel governo constituzionale(Florence, 1877).
See G. Massani,Il generale Alfonso La Marmora(Milan, 1880).
See G. Massani,Il generale Alfonso La Marmora(Milan, 1880).
LAMARTINE, ALPHONSE MARIE LOUIS DE PRAT DE(1790-1869), French poet, historian and statesman, was born at Mâcon on the 21st of October 1790. The order of his surnames is a controversial matter, and they are sometimes reversed. The family of Lamartine was good, and the title of Prat was taken from an estate in Franche Comté. His father was imprisoned during the Terror, and only released owing to the events of the 9th Thermidor. Lamartine’s early education was received from his mother. He was sent to school at Lyons in 1805, but not being happy there was transferred to the care of the Pères de la Foi at Belley, where he remained until 1809. For some time afterwards he lived at home, reading romantic and poetical literature, but in 1811 he set out for Italy, where he seems to have sojourned nearly two years. His family having been steady royalists, he entered the Gardes du corps at the return of the Bourbons, and during the Hundred Days he sought refuge first in Switzerland and then at Aix-en-Savoie, where he fell in love, with abundant results of the poetical kind. After Waterloo he returned to Paris. In 1818-1819 he revisited Switzerland, Savoy and Italy, the death of his beloved affording him new subjects for verse. After some difficulties he had his first book, theMéditations, poétiques et religieuses, published (1820). It was exceedingly popular, and helped him to make a position. He had left the army for some time; he now entered the diplomatic service and was appointed secretary to the embassy at Naples. On his way to his post he married, in 1823, at Geneva a young English lady, Marianne Birch, who had both money and beauty, and in the same year hisNouvelles méditations poétiquesappeared.
In 1824 he was transferred to Florence, where he remained five years. HisLast Canto of Childe Haroldappeared in 1825, and he had to fight a duel (in which he was wounded) with an Italian officer, Colonel Pepe, in consequence of a phrase in it. Charles X., on whose coronation he wrote a poem, gave him the order of the Legion of Honour. TheHarmonies poétiques et religieusesappeared in 1829, when he had left Florence. Having refused an appointment in Paris under the Polignac ministry, he went on a special mission to Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg. In the same year he was elected to the Academy. Lamartine was in Switzerland, not in Paris, at the time of the Revolution of July, and, though he put forth a pamphlet on “Rational Policy,” he did not at that crisis take any active part in politics, refusing, however, to continue his diplomatic services under the new government. In 1832 he set out with his wife and daughter for Palestine, having been unsuccessful in his candidature for a seat in the chamber. His daughter Julia died at Beirut, and before long he received the news of his election by a constituency (Bergues) in the department of the Nord. He returned through Turkey and Germany, and made his first speech shortly after the beginning of 1834. Thereafter he spoke constantly, and acquired considerable reputation as an orator,—bringing out, moreover, many books in prose and verse. His Eastern travels (Voyage en Orient) appeared in 1835, hisChute d’un angeandJocelynin 1837, and hisRecueillements, the last remarkable volume of his poetry, in 1839. As the reign of Louis Philippe went on, Lamartine, who had previously been a liberal royalist, something after the fashion of Chateaubriand, became more and more democratic in his opinions. He set about his greatest prose work, theHistoire des Girondins, which at first appeared periodically, and was published as a whole in 1847. Like many other French histories, it was a pamphlet as well as a chronicle, and the subjects of Lamartine’s pen became his models in politics.
At the revolution of February Lamartine was one of the first to declare for a provisional government, and became a member of it, with the post of minister for foreign affairs. He was elected for the new constituent assembly in ten different departments, and was chosen one of the five members of the Executive Committee. For a few months indeed Lamartine, from being adistinguished man of letters, an official of inferior rank in diplomacy, and an eloquent but unpractical speaker in parliament, became one of the foremost men in Europe. His inexperience in the routine work of government, the utterly unpractical nature of his colleagues, and the turbulence of the Parisian mob, proved fatal to his chances. He gave some proofs of statesmanlike ability, and his eloquence was repeatedly called into requisition to pacify the Parisians. But no one can permanently carry on the government of a great country by speeches from the balcony of a house in the capital, and Lamartine found himself in a dilemma. So long as he held aloof from Ledru-Rollin and the more radical of his colleagues, the disunion resulting weakened the government; as soon as he effected an approximation to them the middle classes fell off from him. The quelling of the insurrection of the 15th of May was his last successful act. A month later the renewal of active disturbances brought on the fighting of June, and Lamartine’s influence was extinguished in favour of Cavaignac. Moreover, his chance of renewed political pre-eminence was gone. He had been tried and found wanting, having neither the virtues nor the vices of his situation. In January 1849, though he was nominated for the presidency, only a few thousand votes were given to him, and three months later he was not even elected to the Legislative Assembly.
The remaining story of Lamartine’s life is somewhat melancholy. He had never been a rich man, nor had he been a saving one, and during his period of popularity and office he had incurred great expenses. He now set to work to repair his fortune by unremitting literary labour. He brought out in thePresse(1849) a series ofConfidences, and somewhat later a kind of autobiography, entitledRaphael. He wrote several historical works of more or less importance, theHistory of the Revolution of 1848,The History of the Restoration,The History of Turkey,The History of Russia, besides a large number of small biographical and miscellaneous works. In 1858 a subscription was opened for his benefit. Two years afterwards, following the example of Chateaubriand, he supervised an elaborate edition of his own works in forty-one volumes. This occupied five years, and while he was engaged on it his wife died (1863). He was now over seventy; his powers had deserted him, and even if they had not the public taste had entirely changed. His efforts had not succeeded in placing him in a position of independence; and at last, in 1867, the government of the Empire (from which he had perforce stood aloof, though he never considered it necessary to adopt the active protesting attitude of Edgar Quinet and Victor Hugo) came to his assistance, a vote of £20,000 being proposed in April of that year for his benefit by Émile Ollivier. This was creditable to both parties, for Lamartine, both as a distinguished man of letters and as a past servant of the state, had every claim to the bounty of his country. But he was reproached for accepting it by the extreme republicans and irreconcilables. He did not enjoy it long, dying on the 28th of February 1869.
As a statesman Lamartine was placed during his brief tenure of office in a position from which it would have been almost impossible for any man, who was not prepared and able to play the dictator, to emerge with credit. At no time in history were unpractical crotchets so rife in the heads of men as in 1848. But Lamartine could hardly have guided the ship of state safely even in much calmer weather. He was amiable and even estimable, the chief fault of his character being vanity and an incurable tendency towards theatrical effect, which makes his travels, memoirs and other personal records as well as his historical works radically untrustworthy. Nor does it appear that he had any settled political ideas. He did good by moderating the revolutionary and destructive ardour of the Parisian populace in 1848; but he had been perhaps more responsible than any other single person for bringing about the events of that year by the vague and frothy republican declamation of hisHistoire des Girondins.More must be said of his literary position. Lamartine had the advantage of coming at a time when the literary field, at least in the departments of belles lettres, was almost empty. The feeble school of descriptive writers, epic poets of the extreme decadence, fabulists and miscellaneous verse-makers, which the Empire had nourished could satisfy no one. Madame de Staël was dead; Chateaubriand, though alive, was something of a classic, and had not effected a full revolution. Lamartine did not himself go the complete length of the Romantic revival, but he went far in that direction. He availed himself of the reviving interest in legitimism and Catholicism which was represented by Bonald and Joseph de Maistre, of the nature worship of Rousseau and Bernardin de Saint Pierre, of the sentimentalism of Madame de Staël, of the medievalism and the romance of Chateaubriand and Scott, of themaladie du siècleof Chateaubriand and Byron. Perhaps if his matter be very closely analysed it will be found that he added hardly anything of his own. But if the parts of the mixture were like other things the mixture itself was not. It seemed indeed to the immediate generation so original that tradition has it that theMéditationswere refused by a publisher because they were in none of the accepted styles. They appeared when Lamartine was nearly thirty years old. The best of them, and the best thing that Lamartine ever did, is the famousLac, describing his return to the little mountain tarn of Le Bourget after the death of his mistress, with whom he had visited it in other days. The verse is exquisitely harmonious, the sentiments conventional but refined and delicate, the imagery well chosen and gracefully expressed. There is an unquestionable want of vigour, but to readers of that day the want of vigour was entirely compensated by the presence of freshness and grace. Lamartine’s chief misfortune in poetry was not only that his note was a somewhat weak one, but that he could strike but one. The four volumes of theMéditations, theHarmoniesand theRecueillements, which contained the prime of his verse, are perhaps the most monotonous reading to be found anywhere in work of equal bulk by a poet of equal talent. They contain nothing but meditative lyrical pieces, almost any one of which is typical of the whole, though there is considerable variation of merit. The two narrative poems which succeeded the early lyrics,Jocelynand theChute d’un ange, were, according to Lamartine’s original plan, parts of a vast “Epic of the Ages,” some further fragments of which survive.Jocelynhad at one time more popularity in England than most French verse.La Chute d’un ange, in which the Byronic influence is more obvious than in any other of Lamartine’s works, and in which some have also seen that of Alfred de Vigny, is more ambitious in theme, and less regulated by scrupulous conditions of delicacy in handling, than most of its author’s poetry. It does, however, little more than prove that such audacities were not for him.As a prose writer Lamartine was very fertile. His characteristics in his prose fiction and descriptive work are not very different from those of his poetry. He is always and everywhere sentimental, though very frequently, as in his shorter prose tales (The Stone Mason of Saint-Point,Graziella, &c.), he is graceful as well as sentimental. In his histories the effect is worse. It has been hinted that Lamartine’s personal narratives are doubtfully trustworthy; with regard to his Eastern travels some of the episodes were stigmatized as mere inventions. In his histories proper the special motive for embellishment disappears, but the habit of inaccuracy remains. As an historian he belongs exclusively to the rhetorical school as distinguished from the philosophical on the one hand and the documentary on the other.It is not surprising when these characteristics of Lamartine’s work are appreciated to find that his fame declined with singular rapidity in France. As a poet he had lost his reputation many years before he died. He was entirely eclipsed by the brilliant and vigorous school who succeeded him with Victor Hugo at their head. His power of initiative in poetry was very small, and the range of poetic ground which he could cover strictly limited. He could only carry the picturesque sentimentalism of Rousseau, Bernardin de Saint Pierre and Chateaubriand a little farther, and clothe it in language and verse a little less antiquated than that of Chênedollé and Millevoye. He has been said to be a French Cowper, and the parallel holds good in respect of versification and of his relative position to the more daringly innovating school that followed, though not in respect of individual peculiarities. Lamartine in short occupied a kind of half-way house between the 18th century and the Romantic movement, and he never got any farther. When Matthew Arnold questioned his importance in conversation with Sainte-Beuve, the answer was, “He is important tous,” and it was a true answer; but the limitation is obvious. In more recent years, however, efforts have been made by Brunetière and others to remove it. The usual revolution of critical as of other taste, the oblivion of personal and political unpopularity, and above all the reaction against Hugo and the extreme Romantics, have been the main agents in this. Lamartine has been extolled as a pattern of combined passion and restraint, as a model of nobility of sentiment, and as a harmonizer of pure French classicism in taste and expression with much, if not all, the better part of Romanticism itself. These oscillations of opinion are frequent, if not universal, and it is only after more than one or two swings that the pendulum remains at the perpendicular. The above remarks are an attempt to correct extravagance in either direction. But it is difficult to believe that Lamartine can ever permanently take rank among the first order of poets.The edition mentioned is the most complete one of Lamartine, but there are many issues of his separate works. After his death some poems andMémoires inéditsof his youth were published, and also two volumes of correspondence, while in 1893 Mlle V. de Lamartine added a volume ofLettresto him. The change of views above referred to may be studied in the detached articles of MM. Brunetière,Faguet, Lemaître, &c., and in the more substantive work of Ch. de Pomairols,Lamartine(1889); E. Deschanel,Lamartine(1893); E. Zyrowski,Lamartine(1896); and perhaps best of all in the Preface to Emile Legouis’ Clarendon Press edition ofJocelyn(1906), where a vigorous effort is made to combat the idea of Lamartine’s sentimentality and femininity as a poet.
As a statesman Lamartine was placed during his brief tenure of office in a position from which it would have been almost impossible for any man, who was not prepared and able to play the dictator, to emerge with credit. At no time in history were unpractical crotchets so rife in the heads of men as in 1848. But Lamartine could hardly have guided the ship of state safely even in much calmer weather. He was amiable and even estimable, the chief fault of his character being vanity and an incurable tendency towards theatrical effect, which makes his travels, memoirs and other personal records as well as his historical works radically untrustworthy. Nor does it appear that he had any settled political ideas. He did good by moderating the revolutionary and destructive ardour of the Parisian populace in 1848; but he had been perhaps more responsible than any other single person for bringing about the events of that year by the vague and frothy republican declamation of hisHistoire des Girondins.
More must be said of his literary position. Lamartine had the advantage of coming at a time when the literary field, at least in the departments of belles lettres, was almost empty. The feeble school of descriptive writers, epic poets of the extreme decadence, fabulists and miscellaneous verse-makers, which the Empire had nourished could satisfy no one. Madame de Staël was dead; Chateaubriand, though alive, was something of a classic, and had not effected a full revolution. Lamartine did not himself go the complete length of the Romantic revival, but he went far in that direction. He availed himself of the reviving interest in legitimism and Catholicism which was represented by Bonald and Joseph de Maistre, of the nature worship of Rousseau and Bernardin de Saint Pierre, of the sentimentalism of Madame de Staël, of the medievalism and the romance of Chateaubriand and Scott, of themaladie du siècleof Chateaubriand and Byron. Perhaps if his matter be very closely analysed it will be found that he added hardly anything of his own. But if the parts of the mixture were like other things the mixture itself was not. It seemed indeed to the immediate generation so original that tradition has it that theMéditationswere refused by a publisher because they were in none of the accepted styles. They appeared when Lamartine was nearly thirty years old. The best of them, and the best thing that Lamartine ever did, is the famousLac, describing his return to the little mountain tarn of Le Bourget after the death of his mistress, with whom he had visited it in other days. The verse is exquisitely harmonious, the sentiments conventional but refined and delicate, the imagery well chosen and gracefully expressed. There is an unquestionable want of vigour, but to readers of that day the want of vigour was entirely compensated by the presence of freshness and grace. Lamartine’s chief misfortune in poetry was not only that his note was a somewhat weak one, but that he could strike but one. The four volumes of theMéditations, theHarmoniesand theRecueillements, which contained the prime of his verse, are perhaps the most monotonous reading to be found anywhere in work of equal bulk by a poet of equal talent. They contain nothing but meditative lyrical pieces, almost any one of which is typical of the whole, though there is considerable variation of merit. The two narrative poems which succeeded the early lyrics,Jocelynand theChute d’un ange, were, according to Lamartine’s original plan, parts of a vast “Epic of the Ages,” some further fragments of which survive.Jocelynhad at one time more popularity in England than most French verse.La Chute d’un ange, in which the Byronic influence is more obvious than in any other of Lamartine’s works, and in which some have also seen that of Alfred de Vigny, is more ambitious in theme, and less regulated by scrupulous conditions of delicacy in handling, than most of its author’s poetry. It does, however, little more than prove that such audacities were not for him.
As a prose writer Lamartine was very fertile. His characteristics in his prose fiction and descriptive work are not very different from those of his poetry. He is always and everywhere sentimental, though very frequently, as in his shorter prose tales (The Stone Mason of Saint-Point,Graziella, &c.), he is graceful as well as sentimental. In his histories the effect is worse. It has been hinted that Lamartine’s personal narratives are doubtfully trustworthy; with regard to his Eastern travels some of the episodes were stigmatized as mere inventions. In his histories proper the special motive for embellishment disappears, but the habit of inaccuracy remains. As an historian he belongs exclusively to the rhetorical school as distinguished from the philosophical on the one hand and the documentary on the other.
It is not surprising when these characteristics of Lamartine’s work are appreciated to find that his fame declined with singular rapidity in France. As a poet he had lost his reputation many years before he died. He was entirely eclipsed by the brilliant and vigorous school who succeeded him with Victor Hugo at their head. His power of initiative in poetry was very small, and the range of poetic ground which he could cover strictly limited. He could only carry the picturesque sentimentalism of Rousseau, Bernardin de Saint Pierre and Chateaubriand a little farther, and clothe it in language and verse a little less antiquated than that of Chênedollé and Millevoye. He has been said to be a French Cowper, and the parallel holds good in respect of versification and of his relative position to the more daringly innovating school that followed, though not in respect of individual peculiarities. Lamartine in short occupied a kind of half-way house between the 18th century and the Romantic movement, and he never got any farther. When Matthew Arnold questioned his importance in conversation with Sainte-Beuve, the answer was, “He is important tous,” and it was a true answer; but the limitation is obvious. In more recent years, however, efforts have been made by Brunetière and others to remove it. The usual revolution of critical as of other taste, the oblivion of personal and political unpopularity, and above all the reaction against Hugo and the extreme Romantics, have been the main agents in this. Lamartine has been extolled as a pattern of combined passion and restraint, as a model of nobility of sentiment, and as a harmonizer of pure French classicism in taste and expression with much, if not all, the better part of Romanticism itself. These oscillations of opinion are frequent, if not universal, and it is only after more than one or two swings that the pendulum remains at the perpendicular. The above remarks are an attempt to correct extravagance in either direction. But it is difficult to believe that Lamartine can ever permanently take rank among the first order of poets.
The edition mentioned is the most complete one of Lamartine, but there are many issues of his separate works. After his death some poems andMémoires inéditsof his youth were published, and also two volumes of correspondence, while in 1893 Mlle V. de Lamartine added a volume ofLettresto him. The change of views above referred to may be studied in the detached articles of MM. Brunetière,Faguet, Lemaître, &c., and in the more substantive work of Ch. de Pomairols,Lamartine(1889); E. Deschanel,Lamartine(1893); E. Zyrowski,Lamartine(1896); and perhaps best of all in the Preface to Emile Legouis’ Clarendon Press edition ofJocelyn(1906), where a vigorous effort is made to combat the idea of Lamartine’s sentimentality and femininity as a poet.
(G. Sa.)
LAMB, CHARLES(1775-1834), English essayist and critic, was born in Crown Office Row, Inner Temple, London, on the 10th of February 1775. His father, John Lamb, a Lincolnshire man, who filled the situation of clerk and servant-companion to Samuel Salt, a member of parliament and one of the benchers of the Inner Temple, was successful in obtaining for Charles, the youngest of three surviving children, a presentation to Christ’s Hospital, where the boy remained from his eighth to his fifteenth year (1782-1789). Here he had for a schoolfellow Samuel Taylor Coleridge, his senior by rather more than two years, and a close and tender friendship began which lasted for the rest of the lives of both. When the time came for leaving school, where he had learned some Greek and acquired considerable facility in Latin composition, Lamb, after a brief stay at home (probably spent, as his school holidays had often been, over old English authors in Salt’s library) was condemned to the labours of the desk—“an inconquerable impediment” in his speech disqualifying him for the clerical profession, which, as the school exhibitions were usually only given to those preparing for the church, thus deprived him of the only means by which he could have obtained a university education. For a short time he was in the office of Joseph Paice, a London merchant, and then for twenty-three weeks, until the 8th of February 1792, he held a small post in the Examiner’s Office of the South Sea House, where his brother John was established, a period which, although his age was but sixteen, was to provide him nearly thirty years later with materials for the first of theEssays of Elia. On the 5th of April 1792, he entered the Accountant’s Office in the East India House, where during the next three and thirty years the hundred official folios of what he used to call his true “works” were produced.
Of the years 1792-1795 we know little. At the end of 1794 he saw much of Coleridge and joined him in writing sonnets in theMorning Post, addressed to eminent persons: early in 1795 he met Southey and was much in the company of James White, whom he probably helped in the composition of theOriginal Letters of Sir John Falstaff; and at the end of the year for a short time he became so unhinged mentally as to necessitate confinement in an asylum. The cause, it is probable, was an unsuccessful love affair with Ann Simmons, the Hertfordshire maiden to whom his first sonnets are addressed, whom he would have seen when on his visits as a youth to Blakesware House, near Widford, the country home of the Plumer family, of which Lamb’s grandmother, Mary Field, was for many years, until her death in 1792, sole custodian.
It was in the late summer of 1796 that a dreadful calamity came upon the Lambs, which seemed to blight all Lamb’s prospects in the very morning of life. On the 22nd of September his sister Mary, “worn down to a state of extreme nervous misery by attention to needlework by day and to her mother at night,” was suddenly seized with acute mania, in which she stabbed her mother to the heart. The calm self-mastery and loving self-renunciation which Charles Lamb, by constitution excitable, nervous and self-mistrustful, displayed at this crisis in his own history and in that of those nearest him, will ever give him an imperishable claim to the reverence and affection of all who are capable of appreciating the heroisms of common life. With the help of friends he succeeded in obtaining his sister’s release from the lifelong restraint to which she would otherwise have been doomed, on the express condition that he himself should undertake the responsibility for her safe keeping. It proved no light charge: for though no one was capable of affording a more intelligent or affectionate companionship than Mary Lamb during her periods of health, there was ever present the apprehension of the recurrence of her malady; and when from time to time the premonitory symptoms had become unmistakable, there was no alternative but her removal, which took place in quietness and tears. How deeply the whole course of Lamb’s domestic life must have been affected by his singular loyalty as a brother needs not to be pointed out.
Lamb’s first appearance as an author was made in the year of the great tragedy of his life (1796), when there were published in the volume ofPoems on Various Subjectsby Coleridge four sonnets by “Mr Charles Lamb of the India House.” In the following year he contributed, with Charles Lloyd, a pupil of Coleridge, some pieces in blank verse to the second edition of Coleridge’sPoems. In 1797 his short summer holiday was spent with Coleridge at Nether Stowey, where he met the Wordsworths, William and Dorothy, and established a friendship with both which only his own death terminated. In 1798, under the influence of Henry Mackenzie’s novelJulie de Roubigné, he published a short and pathetic prose tale entitledRosamund Gray, in which it is possible to trace beneath disguised conditions references to the misfortunes of the author’s own family, and many personal touches; and in the same year he joined Lloyd in a volume ofBlank Verse, to which Lamb contributed poems occasioned by the death of his mother and his aunt Sarah Lamb, among them being his best-known lyric, “The Old Familiar Faces.” In this year, 1798, he achieved the unexpected publicity of an attack by theAnti-Jacobinupon him as an associate of Coleridge and Southey (to whoseAnnual Anthologyhe had contributed) in their Jacobin machinations. In 1799, on the death of her father, Mary Lamb came to live again with her brother, their home then being in Pentonville; but it was not until 1800 that they really settled together, their first independent joint home being at Mitre Court Buildings in the Temple, where they lived until 1809. At the end of 1801, or beginning of 1802, appeared Lamb’s first playJohn Woodvil, on which he set great store, a slight dramatic piece written in the style of the earlier Elizabethan period and containing some genuine poetry and happy delineation of the gentler emotions, but as a whole deficient in plot, vigour and character; it was held up to ridicule by theEdinburgh Reviewas a specimen of the rudest condition of the drama, a work by “a man of the age of Thespis.” The dramatic spirit, however, was not thus easily quenched in Lamb, and his next effort was a farce,Mr H——, the point of which lay in the hero’s anxiety to conceal his name “Hogsflesh”; but it did not survive the first night of its appearance at Drury Lane, in December 1806. Its author bore the failure with rare equanimity and good humour—even to joining in the hissing—and soon struck into new and more successful fields of literary exertion. Before, however, passing to these it should be mentioned that he made various efforts to earn money by journalism, partly by humorous articles, partly as dramatic critic, but chiefly as a contributor of sarcastic or funny paragraphs, “sparing neither man nor woman,” in theMorning Post, principally in 1803.
In 1807 appearedTales founded on the Plays of Shakespeare, written by Charles and Mary Lamb, in which Charles was responsible for the tragedies and Mary for the comedies; and in 1808,Specimens of English Dramatic Poets who lived about the time of Shakespeare, with short but felicitous critical notes. It was this work which laid the foundation of Lamb’s reputation as a critic, for it was filled with imaginative understanding of the old playwrights, and a warm, discerning and novel appreciation of their great merits. In the same year, 1808, Mary Lamb, assisted by her brother, publishedPoetry for Children, and a collection of short school-girl tales under the titleMrs Leicester’s School; and to the same date belongsThe Adventures of Ulysses, designed by Lamb as a companion toThe Adventures of Telemachus. In 1810 began to appear Leigh Hunt’s quarterly periodical,The Reflector, in which Lamb published much (including the fine essays on the tragedies of Shakespeare and on Hogarth) that subsequently appeared in the first collective edition of hisWorks, which he put forth in 1818.
Between 1811, whenThe Reflectorceased, and 1820, he wrote almost nothing. In these years we may imagine him at his most social period, playing much whist and entertaining his friends on Wednesday or Thursday nights; meanwhile gatheringthat reputation as a conversationalist or inspirer of conversation in others, which Hazlitt, who was at one time one of Lamb’s closest friends, has done so much to celebrate. When in 1818 appeared theWorksin two volumes, it may be that Lamb considered his literary career over. Before coming to 1820, and an event which was in reality to be the beginning of that career as it is generally known—the establishment of theLondon Magazine—it should be recorded that in the summer of 1819 Lamb, with his sister’s full consent, proposed marriage to Fanny Kelly, the actress, who was then in her thirtieth year. Miss Kelly could not accept, giving as one reason her devotion to her mother. Lamb bore the rebuff with characteristic humour and fortitude.
The establishment of theLondon Magazinein 1820 stimulated Lamb to the production of a series of new essays (theEssays of Elia) which may be said to form the chief corner-stone in the small but classic temple of his fame. The first of these, as it fell out, was a description of the old South Sea House, with which Lamb happened to have associated the name of a “gay light-hearted foreigner” called Elia, who was a clerk in the days of his service there. The pseudonym adopted on this occasion was retained for the subsequent contributions, which appeared collectively in a volume of essays calledElia, in 1823. After a career of five years theLondon Magazinecame to an end; and about the same period Lamb’s long connexion with the India House terminated, a pension of £450 (£441 net) having been assigned to him. The increased leisure, however, for which he had long sighed, did not prove favourable to literary production, which henceforth was limited to a few trifling contributions to theNew Monthlyand other serials, and the excavation of gems from the mass of dramatic literature bequeathed to the British Museum by David Garrick, which Lamb laboriously read through in 1827, an occupation which supplied him for a time with the regular hours of work he missed so much. The malady of his sister, which continued to increase with ever shortening intervals of relief, broke in painfully on his lettered ease and comfort; and it is unfortunately impossible to ignore the deteriorating effects of an over-free indulgence in the use of alcohol, and, in early life, tobacco, on a temperament such as his. His removal on account of his sister to the quiet of the country at Enfield, by tending to withdraw him from the stimulating society of the large circle of literary friends who had helped to make his weekly or monthly “at homes” so remarkable, doubtless also tended to intensify his listlessness and helplessness. One of the brightest elements in the closing years of his life was the friendship and companionship of Emma Isola, whom he and his sister had adopted, and whose marriage in 1833 to Edward Moxon, the publisher, though a source of unselfish joy to Lamb, left him more than ever alone. While living at Edmonton, whither he had moved in 1833 so that his sister might have the continual care of Mr and Mrs Walden, who were accustomed to patients of weak intellect, Lamb was overtaken by an attack of erysipelas brought on by an accidental fall as he was walking on the London road. After a few days’ illness he died on the 27th of December, 1834. The sudden death of one so widely known, admired and beloved, fell on the public as well as on his own attached circle with all the poignancy of a personal calamity and a private grief. His memory wanted no tribute that affection could bestow, and Wordsworth commemorated in simple and solemn verse the genius, virtues and fraternal devotion of his early friend.
Charles Lamb is entitled to a place as an essayist beside Montaigne, Sir Thomas Browne, Steele and Addison. He unites many of the characteristics of each of these writers—refined and exquisite humour, a genuine and cordial vein of pleasantry and heart-touching pathos. His fancy is distinguished by great delicacy and tenderness; and even his conceits are imbued with human feeling and passion. He had an extreme and almost exclusive partiality for earlier prose writers, particularly for Fuller, Browne and Burton, as well as for the dramatists of Shakespeare’s time; and the care with which he studied them is apparent in all he ever wrote. It shines out conspicuously in his style, which has an antique air and is redolent of the peculiarities of the 17th century. Its quaintness has subjected the author to the charge of affectation, but there is nothing really affected in his writings. His style is not so much an imitation as a reflexion of the older writers; for in spirit he made himself their contemporary. A confirmed habit of studying them in preference to modern literature had made something of their style natural to him; and long experience had rendered it not only easy and familiar but habitual. It was not a masquerade dress he wore, but the costume which showed the man to most advantage. With thought and meaning often profound, though clothed in simple language, every sentence of his essays is pregnant.
He played a considerable part in reviving the dramatic writers of the Shakesperian age; for he preceded Gifford and others in wiping the dust of ages from their works. In his brief comments on each specimen he displays exquisite powers of discrimination: his discernment of the true meaning of his author is almost infallible. His work was a departure in criticism. Former editors had supplied textual criticism and alternative readings: Lamb’s object was to show how our ancestors felt when they placed themselves by the power of imagination in trying situations, in the conflicts of duty or passion or the strife of contending duties; what sorts of loves and enmities theirs were.
As a poet Lamb is not entitled to so high a place as that which can be claimed for him as essayist and critic. His dependence on Elizabethan models is here also manifest, but in such a way as to bring into all the greater prominence his native deficiency in “the accomplishment of verse.” Yet it is impossible, once having read, ever to forget the tenderness and grace of such poems as “Hester,” “The Old Familiar Faces,” and the lines “On an infant dying as soon as born” or the quaint humour of “A Farewell to Tobacco.” As a letter writer Lamb ranks very high, and when in a nonsensical mood there is none to touch him.