[1]A manuscript of Chênedollé's, quoted by Sainte-Beuve inDerniers Portraits, p. 290.
[1]A manuscript of Chênedollé's, quoted by Sainte-Beuve inDerniers Portraits, p. 290.
[2]Chateaubriand,Congrès de Vérone, i. 147.
[2]Chateaubriand,Congrès de Vérone, i. 147.
[3]Sainte-Beuve, from the account of an eye-witness.
[3]Sainte-Beuve, from the account of an eye-witness.
[4]Katerkamp,Denkwürdigkeiten aus dem Leben der Fürstinn Amalia von Galitzin, Münster, 1828.The best idea of her religious enthusiasm is to be gained from such a production as the following beautiful little poem:—GEBET DER LIEBE.Liebe! lehre uns beten, dass uns erhöre die Liebe.O der Liebe vereintes Gebet ist Quelle der Liebe,Quelle des ewigen Lebens und unaussprechlicher Wonne!Schwester, rufe mir zu: "O Bruder! Bitten der LiebeSende dem Vater für mich—ich sende Bitten der LiebeTäglich dem Vater für dich." O Schwester! der Bitten nicht eineKann an die Liebe, von Liebe, für Liebe umsonst seyn.
[4]Katerkamp,Denkwürdigkeiten aus dem Leben der Fürstinn Amalia von Galitzin, Münster, 1828.
The best idea of her religious enthusiasm is to be gained from such a production as the following beautiful little poem:—
GEBET DER LIEBE.
Liebe! lehre uns beten, dass uns erhöre die Liebe.O der Liebe vereintes Gebet ist Quelle der Liebe,Quelle des ewigen Lebens und unaussprechlicher Wonne!Schwester, rufe mir zu: "O Bruder! Bitten der LiebeSende dem Vater für mich—ich sende Bitten der LiebeTäglich dem Vater für dich." O Schwester! der Bitten nicht eineKann an die Liebe, von Liebe, für Liebe umsonst seyn.
[5]Sources: Charles Eynard,Vie de Madame Krüdener, vols. i. and ii.; Sainte-Beuve,Portraits de Femmes; Derniers Portraits; Deutsche Rundschaufor November and December 1899.)
[5]Sources: Charles Eynard,Vie de Madame Krüdener, vols. i. and ii.; Sainte-Beuve,Portraits de Femmes; Derniers Portraits; Deutsche Rundschaufor November and December 1899.)
When the Hundred Days were over, and Louis XVIII, had returned for the second time, a mixed feeling, in which melancholy was the chief ingredient, took possession of the French people. Their king's first return had partaken of the appearance of a recall by the nation. But, seeing that he himself had made no attempt whatever to resist Napoleon with the troops which remained faithful to him, it was not possible to disguise the fact that he had been brought back by the bayonets of foreign armies. Hence in the eyes of the great majority his second accession bore the appearance of a humiliation inflicted upon France. But, on the other hand, it meant the restoration of lawful liberty after the terrible military despotism under which France had now sighed for so many years.
To literature the restoration of the monarchy was, to all appearance at least, a herald of liberty. After the lapse of twenty-five years, free discussion of ideas was again possible. The heavy hand which had lain so crushingly on the press had been removed. The fettered intellects and suppressed ideas were free to bestir themselves; men were at liberty to investigate into and judge the past, the Empire as well as the Revolution; and no great hindrances were placed in the way of their deliberating the future of France.
They were free to do it, but had they any inclination? If they had, it was of the slightest. The mood of France was the mood which follows on a long illness or on a war which has ended in defeat. Not that men longed for redress on the field of battle. Towards the close of Napoleon's reign no echo was awakened in their hearts when the cannon in front of the Invalides proclaimed a victory. They longed for peace, as the sick man, exhausted by blood-letting, longs for rest.
To Frenchmen the idea of living a long, peaceful life once more became a familiar one. For years mothers had trembled when they saw their sons approaching the age of manhood, that is to say, the age at which they became first soldiers and ere long corpses; now they began to hope that these sons had a long life before them. The youths, to whom in their boyhood the rattle of drums and blare of trumpets had been familiar sounds, who even at school had accustomed themselves to the thought of early won honour and an early death, were now obliged to familiarise themselves with the idea of life in time of peace. The natural death to which they now looked forward seemed hideous in comparison with death as it had displayed itself to them heretofore, gloriously beautiful in the purple of victory; what was almost a feeling of disappointment came over them, and they began to brood. Most of the young men who had so long been forced to sacrifice their personal life to the life of the State, the requirements of war, the general aims of their country, welcomed with delight the news that they might break the ranks, and were no longer bound to walk in step behind the drum; they shook the dust of the highways off their feet, threw off their uniforms, and tried to banish every remembrance of military discipline. Coming straight from the battle-fields of the Empire, from the noise and bloodshed of war, they took refuge in the quietness of a country life, far from the bustle and uproar of human crowds. Such was the mood of the moment—a wearied, but complex mood. There was disappointment in it, and hope, and inclination to personal day dreaming. It was not a mood favourable to action, but to brooding, reflection, deliberation.
This national mood explains how it was possible for such poetry as Lamartine'sLes Méditationsto become the favourite literature of the day. No book since Chateaubriand'sGénie du Christianismehad made such a sensation as did the First Part of this work; 45,000 copies of it were sold in four years. Strange as it may seem to us now, the Restoration period found in Lamartine's poetry an interpretation of its feelings and of all that moved its inmost heart—a picture of its ideal longings, painted in the clearest, loveliest dream-colours. It was poetry that resembled the music of an Æolian harp, but the wind that played upon the strings was the spirit of the age. The poems were not so much songs as reflections, not so much heart as spirit harmonies; but in real life there had for long been enough, and more than enough, of the positive—definite forms, decided characters, solid substance, silent acceptance of the strokes of fate. It was by no means considered a fault that there was no strong passion in the poems, no tendency to see the dark and dreadful sides of life, or, in fact, life as it is. There had been enough of all this in reality. After a period during which so many instincts had been forcibly suppressed, men rejoiced in this purely poetic instinct, in this most melodious poet, who had, as he himself said, a chord for every feeling and mood. They longed for just such lyric restfulness after philosophy, revolution, and wars without end. The poemLe Lacwas read with delight by the whole French-speaking world, just because it was so long since men had felt in sympathy with nature, so long since they had looked at the face of the earth from any point of view but the tactical one. It was not only, however, as the poet of feeling that Lamartine represented the spirit of the day; he also represented it in his character of orthodox Christian. The leading note in his poetry was the note of Christian royalism, and devotion to the Bourbon family in particular.
To us, who are acquainted with a Lamartine in whom the Revolution of 1848 seemed to find its incarnation, a Lamartine who was universally regarded as a prophet of humanism, it is of interest to examine the poet's spiritual starting-point.
LAMARTINE
LAMARTINE
Alphonse de Lamartine was born at Mâcon in 1790, of a family belonging to the ranks of the lesser nobility. His father was one of the king's last faithful adherents at the time of the Revolution, and suffered for his devotion. Alphonse's loving, pious mother taught him to read in an illustrated Bible. He thus received his first literary and artistic impressions from scenes in the lives of the Patriarchs, the stories of Joseph and Samuel, of Sarah, and of Tobias and the Angel. After 1794 the family lived a very retired life upon small means on their little property of Milly. The son was at first taught at home by an amiable abbé, then sent to a school at Lyons, the rough, coarse tone of which was terribly repellent to a boy of a naturally refined disposition. By his mother's and his own wish he was removed to a school at Belley, kept by certain Jesuits who had managed to elude the laws banishing them from France, and who called themselvesFathers of the Faith. Here young Lamartine felt himself inexpressibly happy. The teachers were kind and refined; one of them reminded him of Fénélon; in the present century the Jesuits are undoubtedly not only the most unscrupulous, but also the most amiable, cleverest, and consequently most dangerous of all ecclesiastics. Amongst his fellow-pupils Lamartine soon found friends of his own standing, scions of French and Sardinian noble families. Among these were a young Alfieri, young Virieu, who, as V., plays a part in Graziella, and a nephew of Joseph de Maistre, Louis de Vignet. Through de Vignet Lamartine made acquaintance with all the members of the famous de Maistre family; Count Joseph attracted him least as a personality, but influenced him both by letters and by his works.
One day at Belley a master read some passages of Chateaubriand to the boys. The grandeur and charm of the majestic style made the deepest impression upon Lamartine, who had never heard anything like it before. But he declares in his Memoirs that he almost immediately assumed a critical attitude; he fell, he says, into a frenzy of admiration, but "not into a frenzy of bad taste." And he maintains that he presently, in talking to his comrades about theGénie du Christianisme, summed up his objections in the following pronouncement: "The main element in all perfect beauty, naturalness, is wanting. It is beautiful; but it is too beautiful." In other words, Lamartine, who himself wrote so instinctively, thought Chateaubriand's style strained. It is probable that he slightly antedates this criticism. In any case his admiration was such that as late as 1824, when hymning the consecration of Charles X., he wrote:—
L'ARCHEVÊQUE.Et ce preux chevalier qui sur l'écu d'airainPorte au milieu des lis la croix du pélerin,Et dont l'œil, rayonnant de gloire et de génie,Contemple du passé la pompe rajeunie?LE ROI.Chateaubriand!Ce nom à tous les temps répond;L'avenir au passé dans son cœur se confond:Et la France des preux et la France nouvelleUnissent sur son front leur gloire fraternelle.
Tasso was another poet whom Alphonse read with enthusiastic admiration. Ossian taught him that it is possible for true poetry to be vague and misty. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, with his sweetness and his harmony, was Lamartine's, as well as Madame de Krüdener's, favourite model.
Some of the entertaining and immoral books of the eighteenth century which fell into the boy's hands delighted him, and excited his youthful imagination for a short time, but these impressions were effaced by those of the Jesuit school. A combination of religious enthusiasm and delight in the freshness and beauty of nature purified his mind and inspired it with activity.
"Were I to live a thousand years," he writes in his Memoirs, "I should never forget those days of study, those hours of prayer, those nights spent in meditation, and the raptures of joy with which I fulfilled my duties, thinking all the time of God." And almost in the same breath he tells of the bliss of skimming in winter on his skates across the frozen marshes, as if borne on spirit wings, or of sitting under the hornbeams in the mild, still spring air, lost in devotional feeling, and happy in perfect peace of conscience.
The return of the Bourbons was hailed with rejoicing by the Lamartine family, including Alphonse, now a young man. The father (who had been wounded on the 10th of August 1792) conducted his son to Paris, and had him enrolled in the King's Guard. It fell one day to the young officer's lot to walk by the King's bath-chair, when he was being wheeled through the galleries of the Louvre to inspect the art treasures brought back by Napoleon from his various campaigns. The profound reverence of the youth's own mind made him imagine Louis's voice to be melodious, his person majestic and distinguished, his glance commanding, his speech brilliant, his silence eloquent. Several times after this the King addressed a few words to him when he was riding by the side of the royal carriage.
When Napoleon had landed at Cannes and was making his triumphal progress through France, Lamartine followed the Court to the Flemish frontier; there the Guard was disbanded and sent home, and after the Hundred Days Lamartine did not re-enter it, nor did he ever see the King again. But when, in 1820, Louis read the first volume of Lamartine's poems, he remembered their writer as a young officer of his Guard, and sent him, by way of reward, an edition of the poets of ancient Greece and Rome. Lamartine, apropos of this, makes the somewhat hasty remark, that King Louis evidently looked upon himself as an Augustus, who had discovered a Virgil.
The new poet openly proclaims himself to be a disciple of Chateaubriand and Bonald. In hisRaphael(chap. 1.) he tells how he came to make Bonald's acquaintance. When he was at Chambéry (in his twenty-fifth year) worshipping the beautiful young Creole celebrated in his poems under the name of Elvire, that lady asked him to write an ode to Bonald, who was a frequent and honoured visitor at her house, Lamartine informs us that all he then knew of Bonald was his name, and the halo shed around it by its owner's fame as a Christian legislator. "I imagined to myself," he says, "that I was addressing a modern Moses, who derived from the rays of a new Sinai the divine light with which he illuminated human laws." And so the ode which is to be found in the first collection of Lamartine's poems under the titleLe Géniewas written. In it the young poet affirms—
Ainsi des sophistes célèbresDissipant les fausses clartés,Tu tires du sein des ténèbresD'éblouissantes vérités.Par le désordre à l'ordremêmeL'univers moral est conduit.
Here, as everywhere, we come upon that meagre conception of good—order. Bonald responded by sending Lamartine a complete edition of his works. The poet read them with enthusiasm. In notes appended to his ode at a later period he denies that they made any really profound impression on him; but he is confusing his earlier with his later conviction. He writes: "I read these works with that poetical enthusiasm for the past and that emotional reverence inspired by ruins which youthful imagination so easily transforms into dogma and doctrine. For some months I tried to believe, on the authority of Chateaubriand and Bonald, in revealed governments; but in my case, as in other people's, the tendency of the day and the development of human reason dispelled these beautiful illusions, and I comprehended that God reveals nothing to man but his social inclinations, and that the various systems of government are revelations of the age, of circumstances, of the vices and virtues of humanity." It is certain that Lamartine considerably antedates this conviction of his. All theMéditationsare in the same tone as the ode to Bonald. The one entitledDieuis dedicated to Lamennais, the dithyramb on the subject of sacred poetry to Genoude, the translator of the Bible. Lamartine himself wrote forLe Conservateur, a newspaper from the first appearance of which Chateaubriand dated the pronounced European reaction; and when this paper was given up, he, along with Lamennais and Bonald, started a new one on the same lines,Le Défenseur, the special aim of which was to oppose constitutional government. It fell to Lamartine's lot to solicit a contribution from Joseph de Maistre. It is significant that our poet, who by this time was aged thirty, should write to the author ofDu Papein such a tone as this: "Monsieur le Comte! At the time I received your book and your kind and flattering letter, I was very ill. I employ my earliest returning strength to thank you for both, but specially for the honour you do me in calling me nephew, a title of which I boast to all who know you. It is a title which in itself is a reputation, in such estimation is your name held by all those who in this misled and contemptible age understand true and profound genius. M. de Bonald and you, Monsieur le Comte, and one or two others who at a distance follow in your steps, have founded an imperishable school of high philosophy and Christian politics, the influence of which is steadily increasing, especially among the younger generation."
In this same letter Lamartine defines Joseph de Maistre's position in literature to be that of leader of the best writers, and attributes the antagonism to him to "that absurd Gallican presumption" which De Maistre has discountenanced in a manner worthy of all admiration. Lamartine, thus, unmistakably favours the unlimited ecclesiastical authority of the Pope—but, note well, only in theory. In his poetry he is not nearly so dogmatic. When, for example—responding to Chateaubriand's appeal—he considers it his duty, as a Christian poet, to drive heathen mythology out of poetry, it is not really a pious, but an artistic instinct by which he is inspired. The old myths had, as far as lyric poetry was concerned, long ago dwindled into mere allegories or paraphrases, things far too vapid to have an injurious effect upon any one's religion. A crusade against faith in Apollo and Amor was a perfectly unnecessary undertaking.
Lamartine's influence was due to the fact that he uttered, now the sad, now the comforting, now the inspiring words which thousands craved to hear. They did not feel the want of new thoughts in his utterances; they were moved by the sound of his sympathetic voice. They felt once more vibrating within them fibres which, during the period of universal depression, had been completely benumbed; he conjured tones from strings which had long given forth no sound; and men delighted in the novelty which consisted in a revival of old memories. But, besides all this, there was one really new element. For Lamartine the ugly and the bad, nay, even the petty and the mean, did not exist. He clothed everything in a garment of shining light. There was a heavenly radiance over his poetry. For the first time for long years, a wealth of beautiful feeling found expression in melodious verse.
The great naturalist Cuvier, in his speech on the occasion of Lamartine's reception into the Academy in 1830, declared that men, in the profound obscurity which surrounds their reason, require a leader who can snatch them out of the black perplexity of doubt and draw them along with him into the region of light and certainty. He accused Byron of having seen nothing in the universe but a temple for the God of evil, and greeted Lamartine as the poet of hope. Thus did France, like some poor creature recovering from a dangerous illness, confuse hope with belief, comfort with dogma, vital energy with determined vindication of Papal authority—until at last the force of circumstances dispelled the mist, and forced men of letters as well as the general public to adopt definite standpoints.
Even later than this, Lamartine was still the man of the period. Only four months before the outbreak of the Revolution of July, a eulogium of Daru is prescribed as the theme of his oration before the French Academy. He accomplishes the feat of pronouncing it without naming Napoleon's name; and he says frankly: "This century will be dated from our double restoration of lost blessings, the restoration of liberty by the throne and of the throne by liberty.... Let us not forget that our future is inseparably bound up with that of our kings, that it is impossible to separate the tree from its root without drying up the trunk, and that in our country it is monarchy which has borne everything, even the perfect fruit of liberty."
Lamartine now enjoys a period of triumph, the period of budding fame. Fame did not come to him early, for he was thirty years old; but it penetrated like the first rays of the rising sun into his ambitious soul. Let us picture to ourselves a salon in the days of Louis XVIII, as described by writers of the day. About a hundred persons are assembled in a suite of drawing-rooms in the house of some important personage, say General Foy. Lamartine, then an attaché of the embassy in Florence, but for the moment in Paris on one of his short visits, is among the invited guests.[1]A movement of admiration passes through the assembly as he enters—young, erect, handsome, aristocratic in mien and bearing. A crowd, chiefly of ladies, gathers round him; he is conscious of charming faces, splendid toilettes, smiles and flattery on every side. People forget for a moment to offer their congratulations to the deputies present on their last speeches. Even those who have not seen Lamartine before know him at once, for he outshines all. General Foy goes up to him, enthusiastically presses his hand, and assures him that it is in his power, whenever he chooses, to become an ornament of the Chamber, which has long stood in need of just such a talented champion of the sacred principles of royalty. Then Lamartine, in the melodious voice which as yet has never uttered a political catchword, repeats one or two of his first poems—L'Enthousiasme, Souvenir, Le Désespoir, La Prière, La Foi, or some such reflective pieces—thereby producing boundless ecstasy, and calling forth outbursts of every shade of enthusiasm and gratitude. Benjamin Constant comes up with his impenetrable, solemnly ironic mien, congratulates him on having discovered this new fountain of poetical inspiration, and assures him that he knows of no such loftiness and purity of thought and expression except in Schiller's reflective poems. The ladies are of opinion that this comparison is very flattering indeed to Schiller, an unknown German bourgeois poet, whose name they just remember having heard. What is he compared with Lamartine!
Various circumstances contributed to heighten the effect produced by the poems themselves—in the first place, the uncommon and almost feminine personal beauty of their author; in the second, the rumours in circulation regarding the lady whose praises were sung with such seraphic enthusiasm, such supernatural purity. It was reported that the poet had loved, and that death had deprived him of the object of his affections. Much trouble was taken to discover the actual circumstances of the case. Who was this Elvire? What was her real name?
We of to-day have been sufficiently enlightened by Lamartine's own later prose works, but with the satisfaction of curiosity on this subject interest in Lamartine's lyric poetry is not extinguished.
It was natural that the contemporaries of the youthful Lamartine should see in him first and foremost the poet of the throne and the altar. His earliest published poem was a heart-felt expression of gratitude to the Jesuit school which had sheltered him in his boyhood. Such a poem as his Ode was simply the essence of Chateaubriand'sGénie du Christianismeversified. His lines on the birth of the Duke of Bordeaux (Comte de Chambord), after the death of his father, the Duc de Berry, with their refrain: "He is born, the miraculous child!" expressed the feelings of the most loyal Catholics. And on every occasion, in almost all of the poems, he lauds and magnifies, justifies and adores God, Providence. At times, as for instance in the poemLa Semaine Sainte, written during a visit to the young Duc de Rohan, who later in life became an archbishop and a cardinal, his verse is almost like a fervently devotional burning of incense. If he is to be taken at his word when he asserts, in writing of this poem many years afterwards, that he alone, among the young men who gathered round the Duke, had no relish whatever for the church's mystic joys, all we can conclude is that his poetic talent was carried away by the current of the tendency of the day.
Most of the purely religious poetry of Lamartine's youthful period is, from its want of simplicity and real feeling, almost unreadable nowadays. It is not lyric; it is not concise; it is reflection without matter, meditation without thoughts, breadth without depth. A good example is the poem dedicated to Byron, entitledL'Homme. The French poet's conception of his English contemporary is the traditional, stereotyped, inexpressibly silly one of the day, namely, that he touches only the chords of despair, that his eye, like Satan's, fathoms abysses, &c. To show Byron how the true poet ought to sing, Lamartine strikes up the most servile hymn of praise to a God who, he himself tells us, plagues, tortures, plunders, overwhelms with misfortune and misery, and concludes with the exhortation:
Jette un cri vers le ciel, ô chantre des enfers!
The notes appended at a later period to this poem betray an astonishing ignorance of Lord Byron's history; almost everything affirmed of him is incorrect. Though Lamartine added a poem to Child Harold, he never so much as learned to spell the name correctly.
The same admonitory tone which he here assumes towards Byron he adopted many years later in writing of Alfred de Musset, to whom he also offered pious and moral truisms as medicaments.
The piety which Lamartine felt in duty bound to display is less offensive, because more sincere, in the ode entitledL'Immortalité. This poem is addressed to the beloved of his youth, Elvire, whose scepticism was a great grief to him, and its aim is to comfort her on her death-bed with the prospect of an immortality in which until now she has refused to believe. But even here we have such frigid allegorical ideas as: "And Hope, standing by thy side, O Death! dreaming upon a grave, opens to me a fairer world."
In only one of the poems which invoke the Deity is Lamartine really the lyric poet and not merely the fluent verse-writer, namely inLe Désespoir, a Meditation which expresses revolt against our idea of God. In this poem we have rhythmic flow, passion, and two qualities rarely found in Lamartine's productions—vigour and conciseness. What has God seen since the creation of the world?
La vertu succombant sous l'audace impunie,L'imposture en honneur, la vérité bannie;L'errante libertéAux dieux vivants du monde offerte en sacrifice;Et la force, par-tout, fondant de l'injusticeLe règne illimité.
And in its original form the poem contained verses, suppressed at the time of publication, which expressed sentiments far more bitter and impious than these. It is characteristic that almost immediately after the appearance ofLe Désespoir, Lamartine, at his mother's request, refuted the ideas it expressed in a reply-poem,Dieu à l'Hommewhich, though not wanting in melodious sonority, is, as even its author perceived, not to be compared with the first. The first, he himself correctly observes, is the product of inspiration, the second of reflection.
But all the theological trappings were, as one might say, only glued on to Lamartine's poetry. Or one might perhaps with more propriety liken them to a carelessly constructed raft, which for a time floats upon the bosom of the stream and then breaks up into its component parts and disappears. All this pious dogmatism soon resolved itself into love of nature, worship of nature, a sincerely religious philosophy of nature.
What really lived and breathed in those early poems was something independent of their religious dogmatism, namely, the whole emotional life of a gentle, yet dignified soul. The soul which found expression in them had this characteristic of the new century, that it loved solitude, and only in solitude found itself and felt itself rich. It was an unsociable soul, only disposed to vibrate in harmony with nature. It was sad and pathetically earnest; under no circumstances whatever cheerful or gay. And, finally, it was never erotic; one only of the poems was an expression of the happiness of satisfied love; the feeling pervading all the rest was sorrow over the loss of the loved one, whom death had claimed as his prey. The poetry of the eighteenth century had resolved love into gallantry, had taken neither it nor woman seriously, but in this new poetry love was the silent worship of a memory, and woman was adored and glorified as she had been in the days of the Minnesingers; only now it was woman as the departed one, as the spirit.
Never did Lamartine depict the wild grief of loss at the moment of the loss; in his poems grief has become a condition, a silent despair which blunts, stiffens, tortures, and at a rare time dissolves into tears.
This new song was song which flowed naturally from its fountain, plentiful and pure; it was music like harp-strains blended with the tones of celestial violins. And, borne on these tones, simple, familiar emotions communicated themselves to the reader's mind, such thoughts as that of the poemLa Retraite—happiness awaits me nowhere; or ofL'Automne—nature's autumnal mourning garb harmonises with my sorrow and is pleasant to my eyes; or ofLe Golfe de Baya—this spot, once the scene of such great events, preserves not a trace of them; in like manner we ourselves shall disappear, leaving no trace behind. But, note well; a thought like this last was expressed in such wonderfully beautiful lines as the following:
Ainsi tout change, ainsi tout passe;Ainsi nous-mêmes nous passons,Hélas! sans laisser plus de traceQue cette barque où nous glissonsSur cette mer où tout s'efface.
There was never any systematic description of nature, or any attempt at painting; the momentary impression of nature was caught, even as it passed, by genius, and preserved for all time.
The poet is sitting at evening on the bare mountain side. Venus rises above the horizon (Le Soir). A ray from the star seems to glide across his brow and touch his eyes, and he feels as if the departed one, in whose companionship he had lived here, were hovering near him. He addresses the ray from Venus:
Mon cœur à ta clarté s'enflamme,Je sens des transports inconnus,Je songe à ceux qui ne sont plus:Douce lumière, es-tu leur âme?
Or, sitting on a rock by the lake (Le Bourget), where in bygone happy days he had sat by her side, he is painfully affected by the feeling of the mutability of everything human as compared with the unchangeableness of inanimate nature. This is the emotion to which he gives expression in his poemLe Lac, which, in spite of its extraordinary popularity, is probably the best he ever wrote. It is an excellent type of his poetry; flowing gently, with no exertion perceptible, not even that exertion which we call art, it is as naturally melodious as the rippling of the lake. The emotion which the poet desires to express is indicated with admirable precision in the metaphor with which the first verse concludes: Is it impossible to cast anchor on the ocean of time even for a single day? The lake is described with its waves breaking upon the rocks as they did a year ago, when the beloved one heard their murmur; and the bereaved lover recalls the words which she spoke in the stillness of night, as their boat floated on the waters—an invocation to time, that happy time, to stay its flight, a prayer to it to hasten for the unhappy and suffering, but to linger with those who love and are beloved. He repeats her concluding cry: Prayer is fruitless; let us love one another and enjoy the passing hour! For man there is no haven, time has no shore; it flows on and we disappear. On this memory of the thoughts of his dead love follows the poet's own invocation to nature. He invokes the lake, the silent rocks, the caves, the dark woods, the things which time spares and those which it re-animates, and beseeches them to preserve the remembrance of that night.
And Lamartine, so spiritual in his expression of the grief and loneliness of the bereaved lover, is almost as spiritual when for once he gives expression to happy love. This he does inChant d'amour, a poem which he himself naïvely describes as a modern Song of Solomon, quieter in tone and less Oriental in colouring than the old, but which in reality has as little resemblance to that song as the chastest spirituality of the West has to the glowing sensuality of the East. Here, as elsewhere, the chord which he touches is the chord of plaintive tenderness, gradually modulating into that of religious devotion.
Of Lamartine's youthful verse these purely human poems are all that we really care for nowadays. We are terribly bored by the vapid compositions which, following the prescribed rule for religious poetry, consist of nothing but adoration of the Deity as he reveals himself in his works.
The poet whose acquaintance we make in the human poems is unmistakably very vain, much engrossed with himself and his own lovableness, and at times too honeyed in his language. But his vanity is so childlike and innocent that it does not affect us unpleasantly; and we are favourably impressed by the fact that it is not literary vanity. Lamartine rejoices that he is good-looking, a favourite with distinguished women, a good horseman, in course of time an eloquent orator; but he is not conceited about his poetical gifts, not even proud of them. The man whose talent was that of the true improvisatore with proud humility describes himself in his prefaces and memoirs as one who cultivates art for his pleasure, and who does not belong to the number of the specially initiated. And he really is the dilettante in so far as he is too careless to be called a true artist. He has unconscious technique, he has flexibility and ease, but along with these an inclination to long-windedness and repetition which at times spoils his effects, and a want of the power of self-criticism which makes it difficult, nay, almost impossible, for him to correct and improve. Nevertheless, all his life long he was a poet, a true poet—in spite of his artistic defects one of the most genuine whom France has produced. It was not his fault that he made his appearance in literature under the unpropitious planet of the reaction period.
It was under the influence of the same planet that the man destined to become the most famous French poet of the nineteenth century won a name for himself. Victor Hugo, born in 1802, is for a long period of his life as good a Catholic and royalist as Lamartine, his senior by twelve years. Hugo's literary career corresponds closely with the political career of the French nation. He is an adherent of the Bourbons as long as they are the reigning family. When the Revolution of July takes place, he sympathises with it, and he is an adherent of the new monarchy from the moment it is founded. During the reign of King Louis Philippe, at whose court he is a frequent guest, he becomes an enthusiastic eulogist of Napoleon when the cult of Napoleon is revived in France. He warmly supports the candidature of Louis Napoleon for the post of President of the Republic, continues to lend him his support when he occupies that post, and is even favourable to the idea of an empire, until the feeling that he is despised as a politician estranges him from the Prince-President, and resentment at thecoup d'étatdrives him into the camp of the extreme Republicans. His life may be said to mirror the political movements of France during the first half of the century. He was, as is so often the case with poets, not a leading spirit, but an organ.
In the last preface to hisOdes et BalladesHugo, in his pompous manner, writes of his own career: "History goes into ecstasies over Michel Ney, who, born a cooper, became a marshal of France, and over Murat, who, born an ostler, became a king. The obscurity of their origin is considered to give them an additional claim to respect, and to add to the glory of the position to which they have attained. Of all the ladders which lead from darkness to light, the one which it is most difficult and most meritorious to mount by is undoubtedly that which leads from the position of loyal aristocrat to that of democrat. To rise from a hut to a palace is, no doubt, an uncommon and admirable achievement, but to rise from error to truth is more uncommon and more admirable. In the case of the first ascent, the man gains something, increases his comfort, his power, his wealth, with every upward step; in the case of the second, exactly the opposite happens ... he must pay for his spiritual growth with one sacrifice of temporal well-being after another ... and if it is true that Murat could with pride lay his postillion's whip beside his sceptre, saying: 'This is what I began with,' then certainly the poet may with more justifiable pride and greater inward satisfaction point to the royalist odes which he wrote as a child and youth, and lay them beside the democratic poems and works which he has written as a grown man. And the pride is perhaps especially justifiable in one who at the end of his ascent, on the topmost step of the ladder of light, has found banishment, in the man who can date this preface from exile."
VICTOR HUGO
VICTOR HUGO
Victor Hugo was the son of one of Napoleon's officers who had originally been a violent revolutionist, and as such had exchanged his Christian name, Joseph, for that of Brutus, which, however, he dropped again when the Revolution was at an end. Joseph Hugo was at Besançon, in command of a battalion, when his famous son was born. A few weeks later he was sent to Corsica. From Corsica he was transferred to Elba, thence to Genoa and the Italian army. He entered the service of Napoleon's brother Joseph when Joseph became King of Naples, and at Naples his wife and children joined him in October 1807. When in 1808 Joseph was made King of Spain, Colonel Hugo followed him to that country, sending his wife and three little sons to Paris, where they lived from 1808 till 1811. In the spring of 1811 they accompanied a strong detachment of troops to Madrid, but Hugo thought it prudent to send them back to Paris in the following year, while he himself, who had been promoted with extraordinary rapidity to be aide-de-camp to the King, major-domo of the palace, general, Count of Cisuentes, inspector-general of the Peninsular army, and governor of three provinces, took part in the war until the defeat of Vittoria, in June 1813, obliged Joseph to abdicate. Napoleon, who could not bear General Hugo, and always treated him badly, refused to confirm his appointment as general and his title as count (his other preferments he had lost), and ordered him to enter the French army again with the rank of major. In 1814 and 1815 Joseph Hugo distinguished himself by his able defence of the fortress of Thionville. His son writes of him as if he had been an ardent votary of Napoleon. This he most certainly was not, and when the Bourbons returned they at once gained his complete allegiance by restoring him to his rank of general, with promotion dating from 1809, the year in which he had received it from King Joseph. Thus it was not only Victor Hugo's mother, the daughter of a loyal shipowner of the Breton town of Nantes, who was a devoted royalist; his father, too, was strongly attached to the restored royal house. Causes entirely unconnected with politics produced a misunderstanding between the parents, and they separated. The sons, Abel, Eugène, and Victor, remained with their mother in Paris.
All three possessed literary ability, though only the youngest lived long enough to display his full power and win fame. All three were, to begin with, champions of royalty and the church. Victor said as a boy: "I will be Chateaubriand, or no one."
After winning prizes for their poems in Paris and at Toulouse, the three brothers, with the view of earning a living, started a literary periodical (in 1819). Chateaubriand was at this time editing the extreme Conservative newspaperLe Conservateur. The brothers named their ventureLe Conservateur littéraire, and Chateaubriand gave it a warm welcome. The new periodical came out twice a month until March 1821, and Victor Hugo alone supplied more poems and articles than all the other contributors together. InLe Conservateur littéraireare already to be found some of his most famous odes—Les Vierges de Verdun, the odes on the fate of La Vendée, on the death of the Duke of Berri, on the birth of the Duke of Bordeaux, and the beautiful, more personal song of rejoicing on the occasion of the restoration of the statue of Henry IV. And in it we also find, to the number of over a hundred, his first essays in criticism, of which only a few, and these much tampered with, have been included in the collection entitledLittérature et Philosophie mêlées.
At this period poetry is to Victor Hugo the daughter of religion. Apropos of an ode on the existence of God, he writes: "The desire to thank a bountiful God in language worthy of Him begat poetry. From its birth it shared in the triumphs of religion, which united the earliest societies and began the civilisation of the world. At the present day, when, in order to demolish society, men attack religion, the only bridle upon man, the only lasting tie which holds societies together, it is not surprising that they should seek to make an ally of poetry. But the divine muse does not allow herself to be inspired by that which is nought."
And at this period, too, he proclaims the superiority of Corneille and Racine to Shakespeare and Schiller: "We have never understood the difference alleged to exist between classic and romantic art. Shakespeare's and Schiller's dramas differ from Corneille's and Racine's only in being more faulty."
The first edition of Victor Hugo'sOdesappeared in 1822. Louis XVIII., who read them over and over again, settled an annuity of 1000 francs a year on the poet out of his private purse; in the following year the Ministry of the Interior conferred on him a pension of 2000 francs; and in 1826 the King, on being applied to, increased the amount of his yearly grant.
The King had good reason to show approval, for these first poems of Victor Hugo contain the whole system of orthodox political and religious principles valid under the Bourbon monarchy. They are a faithful image of the period during which they were written.
They pass in review the history of France from 1789 to 1825. In those of them which treat of the Revolution we observe, as in the corresponding poems by Lamartine, that two words occur more frequently than any others—executioners and victims. In the history of the Revolution Hugo sees nothing else. For its leading spirits he has but this one designation—executioners; the Convention he describes as a creation of the devil (livre i. ode 4); and, little as he loves heathen mythology, he cannot resist using the expression,Hydraof anarchy, when he wishes to depict the horrors of the revolutionary period. For the enemies of the Revolution victims is the stereotyped designation; the revolt of La Vendée is eulogised in every second poem, and odes are addressed to its heroes and heroines (La Vendée, Quiberon, Mlle. Sombreuil). The guillotine is always present to the poet's imagination, and is the constant object of his anathemas, except when, as in the odeLe Dévouement(livre iv. ode 4), he is carried away to the extent of desiring martyrdom for himself, "because the martyrs' angel is the most beautiful of all the angels who bear the souls of men to heaven."
Following in the footprints of Chateaubriand, Victor Hugo goes back to the Christian martyrs of ancient Rome, and in no fewer than four odes (Le repas libre, L'homme heureux, Le chant du cirque, Un chant de fête de Néron) describes the agonising triumph of the martyrs over the brutal and voluptuous cruelty to which they in outward appearance succumb. And the symbolism, too, is the same as in Chateaubriand's poetry; it is the death of the orthodox noble or priest which is represented under the form of the butcheries of the circus.
One of the finest of these poems of the Revolution is the oldest, written in memory of a little company of innocent young girls who, under the Reign of Terror, were executed after a long imprisonment without being brought to trial, on the vague and incorrect suspicion that they had testified pleasure when the Prussians entered their town (Les vierges de Verdun). Hugo paints the tribunal of the Convention blacker than is necessary, by crediting the public prosecutor, Fouquier-Tinville, with impure designs upon his victims and putting insulting proposals into his mouth; but even without the addition of unhistorical incidents, the sentence of these girls was so shameful, their fate so tragic, and their behaviour so beautiful and dignified, that they well deserved a poetic monument, even a better one than Hugo raised to them.[2]
The poet's pathos is entirely justifiable in cases like this, where the Revolution showed its dark and unjust side in its dealings with youth and innocence, but it becomes grating and false as soon as his dogmas come into play. His tone in writing of the monarchy and the glories of royalty is positively insufferable. In the Ode to Louis XVIII. God calls upon the seraphs, the prophets, and the archangels to do obeisance to the newly arrived heir to the throne: "Courbez-vous, c'est un Roi." And not content with this, the Deity Himself calls him by his title, not his name: "O Roi!" and reminds him thatGod's own Son was, like him, a king with a crown of thorns. In the poem on the occasion of the baptism of the Comte de Chambord, the language is even stronger: "God has given us one of His angels,as He gave us His Son in the days of old." We are reminded that the water of the river Jordan (brought home by Chateaubriand) in which the child has been baptized is the same in which Jesus was baptized; it is the will of Heaven, we are told, "that the reassured world should, even by the very water used for his baptism, recognise aSaviour." InLa Visionthe eighteenth century is summoned before the judgment-seat of God, and there accused of having in the pride of its knowledge mocked at the dogmas which are the support of the law and of morality. It timidly expresses the hope that the future will view its actions in a more favourable light, but it is mercilessly condemned; the "guilty century" is plunged into the abyss, pursued as it falls by the inexorable voice of the judge.
The standpoint from which Napoleon (who is always called Buonaparte) is viewed harmonises with that from which the Revolution is judged; he is the usurper, the savage soldier, the murderer of Enghien; and again and again it is impressed on us that lilies are better than laurels. Under the name of Colonel G. A. Gustaffson (livre iii. ode 5), Gustavus IV., who lived as an exile in France during the reign of Louis XVIII, is eulogised as the representative of the fallen kings. The personality and story of Gustavus are represented in a manner which witnesses to Hugo's remarkable ignorance of foreign history—the king's whole life is a model life; his great mind is like a temple, whence proceeds the voice of God; he dictates the history of the future; he is the successor of the ancient seers; actuated by disgust at seeing the monarchs bow their necks to Napoleon's yoke, he has voluntarily taken off his crown, and thereby raised his head high above all the other royal heads on earth. Could folly go farther than this? The wretched, insane Gustavus a model king! The Bourbons are of course exalted to the skies. All their family events—birth, baptism, death, ascension, consecration—are treated as of world-wide import. In a poem on the subject of the reprehensible war which France, at Chateaubriand's instigation, carried on with Spain in the interests of the European reaction, royalty, the royal power, is declared to be miraculous; and in the same poem the king is expressly described as the war-lord, supporting himself by the power of the sword; war is, we are told, the companion of royalty:
Il faut, comme un soldat, qu'un prince ait une épée;Il faut, des factions quand l'astre impur a lui,Que, nuit et jour, bravant leur attente trompéeUn glaive veille auprès de lui;Ou que de son armée il se fasse un cortège;Que son fier palais se protègeD'un camp au front étincelant;Car de la Royauté la Guerre est la compagne:On ne peut briser le sceptre de Charlemagne,Sans briser le fer de Roland.
It is not surprising that all these odes should have mottoes taken either from the Bible or from religious works, notably Chateaubriand'sLes Martyrs, a book by which men's minds were so powerfully impressed that the younger poets of the day took a pride in transposing whole pages of it into verse.[3]Lamartine addressed his odeLe Génieto Bonald; Hugo dedicates an ode with the same name to Chateaubriand, of whom he writes that "he suffers the double martyrdom of genius and virtue."
He addresses several poems to Lamartine—it is his desire, he writes, to go into battle on the same war-chariot as his friend, to manage the horses while Lamartine wields the spear—and these poems are among the most attractive of all, partly because they are remarkably beautiful, and testify to the respectful and yet at the same time brotherly feeling of the younger for the elder poet, partly because in them we have, along with Hugo's views on religious and social questions, the expression of his ideas on the subject of art. All the poems prove with what earnestness, but also with what exaggerated and almost offensive self-consciousness, the young poet has apprehended his mission—it is always called a prophet's mission; the poet is a seer, a shepherd of the people; of Lamartine, Hugo goes the length of declaring that one feels as if God had revealed Himself to him face to face. But it is in the poems to Lamartine that we perceive most clearly what is Hugo's conception of the position and relation of the new literature to that of the eighteenth century. It bears a remarkable resemblance to a kindred literary phenomenon in Denmark, namely, Oehlenschläger and his friends' conception of their position to Baggesen. Read, for example, the poemLa Lyre et la Harpe(livre iv. ode 2). The lyre represents the frivolous, licentious poetry of the preceding century, which chants the praises of Jupiter, Mars, Apollo, and Eros, and inculcates an intellectual epicureanism, whereas in the tones of the harp we hear the admonition to watch and pray, to remember the seriousness of life, to think of death, to support and help our stumbling brethren. The poem is dedicated to "Alph. de L."; the word harp in itself pointed to Lamartine.
This offensive attitude towards the past is the first symptom of the approaching breach with that past's whole system of ideas, from which Hugo's significance as an author and leader of a literary movement dates.[4]