ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE.IV. POET, DIPLOMAT, TRAVELLER.
Lamartine spent two winters at Paris after the Restoration. His former acquaintances were scattered, and he had new ones to make. He was for a time solitary and little occupied. He was, nevertheless, resolute in his quest for an opening into public life. His friend Virieu and others introduced him to persons of distinction and one step led presently to another. The passion for literature served to place him on a friendly footing with others of similar tastes, and he became able after a while to enumerate among his acquaintances Chateaubriand, the “Napoleon of French literature,” Lamennais, the French Savonarola, Rocher, Aimé Martin, De Vigny.
The epoch of the Restoration was also the epoch of the Revival of Letters in France. The Revolution had sent scholars and literary men to the scaffold or driven them into exile, and Bonaparte had attempted to level all learning and philosophic culture to the plane of physical and mathematical science. Whatever might elevate the human soul was not tolerated. He aspired to restore the Sixteenth century at the end of the Eighteenth and required literature to be adapted to that end.
LouisXVIII.was always broad and liberal in his sentiments, and even before the Revolution he had cherished familiar relations with literary men and men of learning. His long term of enforced leisure, during his absence from France, and a weakness in his limbs which compelled him to sedentary life, had tended to deepen his interest in such pursuits. He was emphatically a king of the fireside.
The emigrants that returned with him to France, had but imperfectly apprehended the change. Those most bigoted formed a coterie around the Count D’Artois; others endeavored to qualify the action of the King. Hence the court was a combination of old royalty with a new order of things.
A galaxy of stars of the first magnitude was now shining in France. Naturally Lamartine was dazzled by them when he came to Paris. Observing that several young men were recognized in the literary world, he again cherished the notion of publishing.
While himself without employment he conceived the plan of a long poem and actually wrote several cantos. It was to be the history of a human soul and its migrations through successive terms of existence and forms of experience till its eventual reunion to the Centre of the Universe, God.
He also projected and began several other compositions. He labored incessantly to perfect his style, till it became, though diffuse, a model of elegance, energy and correctness.
He had from time to time written verses to which he gave the title ofMeditations. Friends slyly pilfered these, and gave copies to ladies of their acquaintance. These passed from hand to hand till they came to the table of Talleyrand himself. The prince greatly admired them and his praises were repeated to the Marquise de Raigecourt. This lady had been an intimate friend of the Princess Elizabeth. Lamartine had been introduced to her by the Count de Virieu, and she took a motherly interest in his welfare. Yet he could not bringhimself to go to the Court. “I was born wild and free,” he says for himself, “and I did not like to bend down in order to rise.”
From 1815 to 1818 when at home, he composed several tragedies—Medée, one relating to the Crusades, and Saul. He had a hope that by them he might gain some celebrity and perhaps contribute something to the fortune of his parents and sisters. He completed them in the spring of 1818, and having copied them in a plain hand hurried with them to Paris. He solicited an interview with Talma who granted it at once.
On invitation, he read extracts from the tragedy entitled Saul. The great tragedian listened attentively, and was for some time silent. His first words were: “Young man, I have desired to know you for twenty years. You would have been my poet. But it is too late. You are coming to the world and I am going from it.”
He then requested Lamartine to tell him frankly, as a son to a father, his personal history, his family relations, and his wishes.
This he did and told how he had desired to work, to come out of his obscurity, to produce something that would be an honor to the name of his father and a comfort to the heart of his mother. He had thought of Talma. He had written several tragedies, of which this was a specimen.
“Will you be good enough,” he implored, “to hold out your hand and help me succeed by the stage?”
Tears stood in Talma’s eyes. He praised the work, and declared that in the reign of Louis XIV. it would have won applause. But now, tragedy had been superseded, in general estimation, by the drama. He counselled Lamartine to study Shakespeare, to forget art and study nature.
When Lamartine came again to Paris the next winter, he asked him to write for the stage. But Lamartine coveted a public rather than a literary career, and applied to M. Pasquier, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, for a diplomatic appointment.
He was now present at thesalonsor drawing-room parties of the Duchess de Raigecourt, the Duchess de Broglie, Madame de Stael’s daughter, Madame de Ste. Aulaire, Madame de Montcalm, the sister of the Duke de Richelieu. At these he was introduced to persons of distinction. Madame de Sainte Aulaire, who had a divining faculty for discerning young persons who were destined to achieve a career, took a warm interest in his behalf. She invited him to read several pages of his unpublished verses, and afterward encouraged him to print them. He was then recovering from a severe illness. Booksellers, however, objected to the novelty of the style, and he was able only by obstinate perseverance to induce one to undertake the risk.
Now Lamartine was harassed by a new apprehension. The book, whether it broke like an egg by falling to the ground, or proved a successful venture, was liable, although anonymous, to be a source of perplexing complications. The notion of specialties in work was current, and the fact of being an author and writer of verses, might be an obstacle to his hopes.
Madame de St. Aulaire was a relative of the minister, M. Decazes. She and her husband put forth their influence with the Government in his behalf.
About the same time, M. Jules Janin, then at the beginning of his career, finding a copy of theMeditationsat a book-store, purchased it out of curiosity. He found to his astonishment, a new style of poetry; that it admirably depicted the sentiments of the soul and passions of the heart, the joys of earth and the ecstasies of heaven, the hopes of the present and apprehensions of the future. He wrote a long review, which served to arouse the attention of the literary and book-reading public and to create aprodigious demand. Forty-five thousand copies were sold in the next four years, and its author was speedily ranked with Byron, Goethe and Chateaubriand, then the distinguished poets of the period. He had originated a new style of poetry.
Meanwhile Lamartine was sadly awaiting events at his modest quarters and fearing for the fate and effects of his little publication. As he was in bed one morning in the first month of spring, the janitor’s daughter, a girl of twelve or fourteen years, opened the door of the room. It was too early for the morning newspaper. Smiling intelligently, she threw on the bed a little billet having an enormous seal of red wax. There was upon it, Lamartine remarks, “an imprint of a coat of arms that ought to be illustrious, for it was undecipherable.”
“Why do you smile so knowingly, Lucy?” he asked, as he broke the seal and tore off the envelope.
“Because,” said she, “mamma told me that the letter had been brought in the early morning by a chasseur all laced with gold, having a beautiful feather in his hat, and that he had urgently desired that the note should be delivered to you as soon as you awoke, because his mistress had told him: ‘Go quickly; we must not delay the joy and perhaps the fortune of the young man.’”
There were two separate epistles. One was written by the Polish Princess T.... She was a sister of the unfortunate Prince Poniatowski who was drowned while directing the retreat at the battle of Leipsic. Lamartine did not know her and the letter was not addressed to him but to M. Alain, his friend and physician. M. Alain had been for six years the physician and friend of M. de Talleyrand, and during Lamartine’s illness he had cared for him like a mother rather than as a medical attendant. He is depicted as being as tender as learned. Lamartine describes him as most true, good, and generous.
The letter of the princess had been written and despatched before daybreak, and was as follows:—“The Prince de Talleyrand sent me at my waking this note. I address it for your friend, in order that the pleasure which this impression of the great judge will bring you shall be doubled. Communicate this note of the Prince to the young man[2]and thank me for the pleasure which I am giving you, for I know that your sole delight is in the joy of those whom you love.”
Lamartine opened the second note. It was written upon a scrap of paper about five fingers in dimension, spotted with ink, and in a hand evidently hurried and showing signs of fatigue from want of sleep. It began as follows:—“I send you, princess, before I go to sleep the little volume which you lent me last night. Let it suffice you to know that I have not slept, and that I have been reading till four o’clock in the morning so as to read it over again.”
The rest of the note was a prediction of Lamartine’s success, in terms of the most fulsome character. Talleyrand was often oracular, and his foreknowledge seemed almost infallible.[3]“The soul of the old man has been said to be of ice,” Lamartine remarks, “but it glowed all one night with the enthusiasm of twenty years, and this fire had been kindled by certain pages of verses which were by no means complete but which were verses of love.”
“I read the letter of Prince Talleyrand twenty times over,” says Lamartine. “The young girl meanwhile was waiting and watching me as I read and read again, and she blushed with emotion as she beheld it in my face. ‘Come, my little Lucy, and let me kiss you,’ said I.‘You will never bring me a message equal to this. In the lottery of glory children draw the successful lots. Tell your mother that you have brought me aquine.’”[4]
Lamartine’s book was thus placed in the lottery of fortune, and the name of Talleyrand had been called. The great statesman was not in public life at that time, but he was far-seeing, and his scent of public matters was well-nigh infallible. He had no interest to flatter the unknown writer, and Lamartine accepted his assurances as a favorable augury.
Surely enough, little Lucy, a quarter of an hour later, brought another letter in a large official envelope. Lamartine’s friends had been successful in their pleadings, and this was his nomination, signed by M. Pasquier, to the post which he desired on the Legation to Florence.
At the reading of this document, Lamartine was for a time unable to restrain his emotions. He leaped down from the bed, he tells us, and in other ways exhibited his delight. He was not content, however, to exult in his actual good fortune, but immediately began to extend his imagination further.
“I experienced what the shackled courser does when the course is opened,” says he. “I had little mind for the glory of verses, but I did have an unbounded passion for political activity. Already I began to look beyond the long years that separated me from the tribune and field of higher statesmanship.
“This was my true and entire vocation, although my friends think and my enemies say otherwise. I felt that mine was not the powerful creative organization that constitutes great poets; all my talent was of the heart only. But I did feel in me an accuracy of view, an effective power of reasoning, an energy of honest principle, which make statesmen. I had somewhat of the quality of Mirabeau in the reserved mental forces of my being. Fortune and France have since decided otherwise. But Nature knows more than Fortune and France; the one is blind, the other is jealous.”
Nevertheless, Lamartine continued to write verses, and his prose publications are more or less interspersed with poetic productions. He praised his friends, he commemorated those whom he loved in poems. Years afterward in his story of his journey to the Holy Land, he made this declaration: “Life for my mind has always been a great poem, as for my heart it has been love.God,LoveandPoesie, are the three words which I shall desire to be engraved alone upon my monument if I ever deserve a monument.”
While he was sitting in a mystic reverie one evening at Florence, he heard a melodious voice murmur in his ear some lines from theMeditations, which are rendered as follows:
“Perchance the future may reserve for meA happiness whose hope I now resign:Perchance amid the busy world may beSome soul responsive still to mine.”
“Perchance the future may reserve for meA happiness whose hope I now resign:Perchance amid the busy world may beSome soul responsive still to mine.”
“Perchance the future may reserve for meA happiness whose hope I now resign:Perchance amid the busy world may beSome soul responsive still to mine.”
“Perchance the future may reserve for me
A happiness whose hope I now resign:
Perchance amid the busy world may be
Some soul responsive still to mine.”
He was also a member of the Legation to England and afterward became Secretary to the French Embassy at Naples. In 1824 he was appointed Chargé d’Affaires to Tuscany, and remained in that position five years. He made the acquaintance of Louis Bonaparte, the former King of Holland, who was a scientist and philosopher rather than a statesman. Queen Hortense also attempted to have an interview with him, but this he carefully evaded. His mother, however, was a relative of the wife of Lucien Bonaparte and he met several members of that family under circumstances somewhat romantic. Pierre Bonaparte was with him at Paris in the Revolution of 1848.
His older uncle died in 1823, and he became heir of the estates. This uncle was known as M. de Lamartine de Monceauand was by seniority the head of the family. He had never married because his parents opposed the choice he had made. He was thrifty and had increased the value of his property. Lamartine now took his uncle’s designation.
The marriage of Lamartine took place during this period. The bride was Miss Marianne Birch, an English lady of beauty and fortune. She was of amiable disposition and Lamartine’s mother became warmly attached to her.
Neither the accession of wealth, his aristocratic rank, nor diplomatic engagements deterred him from literary composition. In 1823 theNouvelles Meditationswere published, and two years later,The Last Canto of Childe Harold. Lamartine afterward described this latter work as a servile imitation in which his enthusiasm as a copyist and its success were alike “mediocre”—a punishment for feigning an admiration which was not altogether sincere. He had, likewise, another penalty to encounter. Two lines in it are versified in English as follows:
“I seek elsewhere (forgive, O Roman shade!)For men, and not the dust of which they’re made.”
“I seek elsewhere (forgive, O Roman shade!)For men, and not the dust of which they’re made.”
“I seek elsewhere (forgive, O Roman shade!)For men, and not the dust of which they’re made.”
“I seek elsewhere (forgive, O Roman shade!)
For men, and not the dust of which they’re made.”
For this apparent slur he was involved in a controversy leading to a duel and dangerously wounded. At his solicitation to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, his antagonist, Colonel Pepé, was not prosecuted.
LouisXVIII.was succeeded in 1824 by the Count d’Artois as CharlesX.The attempt was now made to reinstate the Government as it existed before the Revolution.
In 1829, at the instance of Chateaubriand, then a member of the Coalition Ministry, Lamartine was recalled. He never ascertained the reason, but attributed it to the influence of Madame Recamier, with whom Chateaubriand was intimate. That lady, however, took an early opportunity to set the matter right by visiting the mother and sisters of Lamartine and inviting him and them to a drawing-room entertainment.
The reactionist Ministry under M. de Polignac was formed in the autumn of that year. It was the final separation of the men of the former century from the men of the time. A portfolio was offered to Lamartine but declined. He was attached to the dynasty, but he had the prescience of its overthrow. “I had seen it coming from afar,” says he. “Nine months before the fatal day, the fall of the new monarchy had been written for me in the names of the men whom it had commissioned to carry it on.”
He was sent on a special mission to Prince Leopold, then Duke of Saxe-Cobourg, and afterward King of Greece;[5]and had received the appointment of ambassador to that country when the Revolution of July overthrew the dynasty. The ministry of Louis-Philippe then offered him his choice of the embassies to Vienna and London. The King visited him to solicit his acceptance, but he was inexorable. The title of Louis-Philippe was legally defective; he was not the next heir to the throne, and he had not been placed on it by the choice of the people of France. For these reasons it was important to him that the supporters of CharlesX.should accept places under him and thus strengthen his pretensions. But says Lamartine: “One should not take part gratuitously in a fault which he did not himself commit.”
M. de St. Aulaire was at that time Minister at Vienna, but greatly desired to be transferred to England. He also waited upon Lamartine, anxious to find out which place he was going to accept. Lamartine quickly assured him.
“If,” said he, “I had the ambition to be ambassador to London, I would instantly sacrifice it without hesitation, in remembrance of the good offices whichyou did to me at the time of my entrance into the great world. But you can go to London without any indebtedness to me, except good will.”
The same year Lamartine was elected one of the “Immortals,” in the French Academy.
The same year he visited England. He there made the acquaintance of Talleyrand. The old statesman received him cordially, and in one interview predicted his career. Lamartine, he remarked, was reserving himself for something more sound and grand than the substituting of an uncle for a nephew upon a throne that had no stable foundation. “You will succeed in it,” he added. “Nature has made you a poet; poetry will make you an orator; tact and thinking will make you a statesman. I know men somewhat; I am eighty years old. I see farther than the objects in sight. You are to have a grand part to perform in the events which will succeed to the present state of affairs. I have witnessed the intrigues of Courts; you will see the movements of the people deceptive in other ways. Let verses go; you know that I adore yours. They are not for the age in which you are now living. Improve yourself in the grand eloquence of Athens and Rome. France will yet have scenes like those of Rome and Athens in her public places.”
From this period Lamartine spent much of his time abroad. He never forgot that he was a citizen of France, but he entertained a strong dislike for the Orleans dynasty. Yet his mother had been educated in the family with the King, and this somewhat increased his perplexity.
He writes of her death pathetically, as the saddest event of his life. He had been loved and cherished by her with a devotion made sublime by its absolute self-abnegation. His first lessons in books and knowledge had been given by her, and he was endowed personally with her most prominent characteristics. She had seemed to know instinctively when and why he suffered, and she possessed a power of divination to foresee his career. Her death, the result of a terrible accident, was to him like the rending violently away of a vital part of his body.
“I hardly thought that I could survive the shock,” he wrote in theSouvenirs. “I was absent from home when the accident occurred which cut short her days. I came back in haste, arriving in time to follow the coffin in which her remains were enshrouded, to the cemetery of the village where we had lived during our infancy.”
The weather was bitterly cold, but this he did not feel. He returned to the house at Milly, now empty for the winter and a thousand times more empty since she who had given it life and soul was sleeping the eternal sleep. Overcome by his grief, he made his way to the little room where the papers of the family were kept, and threw himself down on the floor. There he lay for hours in an ecstasy of woe. The moaning of the wind and the ticking of the clock seemed to be repeating the funeral hymn.
One desire that the mother of Lamartine had instilled into him was that of visiting the East. As she read to him, a boy of eight years, from the Bible about the places where wonderful events had taken place, he resolved that he would some time behold them with his own eyes. Now that he was disengaged from public life there was an opportunity. There was much, however, to persuade him to remain at home; his father and sisters, and besides, he had a beautiful residence at Saint-Point with a wife and daughter to whom he was fondly attached. But he felt that imagination had likewise its necessities and passions.
“I was born a poet,” he pleads. “When young, I had heard the word of Nature, the speech which is formed ofimages and not of sounds. I had even translated into written language some of those accents that had stirred me, and that had in their turn stirred other souls. But these accents did not now satisfy me.”
“Besides, I was, I had almost always been, a Christian in heart and in imagination; my mother had made me such.” This pilgrimage though not as of the Christian, at least of the man and the poet, would delight her in the celestial abode where he saw her, and she would be to them as a second Providence between them and dangers.
His duty to his country was likewise considered. He had sacrificed to it this dream of his for sixteen years. There was need for heaven to raise up new men; the present politics made man ashamed and angels weep. “Destiny gives an hour in a century for humanity to be regenerated; that hour is a revolution; and men let it pass to tear one another to pieces: thus they give to revenge the hour given by God for their regeneration and progress.”
All was duly made ready for the journey. He set sail from Marseilles, in the brigAlceste, on the eleventh of July, 1832, expecting to be absent two years. His wife and daughter and three friends, one of them a physician, composed the party. The voyage was full of incident, and his journal abounds with adventures and predictions. Lamartine was what imaginative persons term a visionary. He was really oriental and tropical in temperament, and ready to catch the spirit of the region to which he was sailing; for Syria, Arabia and Palestine have always been renowned for mystics, seers and prophets.
As the vessel passed the coast of Tunis, he wrote his impressions. He had never loved the Romans nor taken the least interest in behalf of Carthage; but he sympathized with Hannibal. “I love or I abhor, in the physical sense of the word,” says he. “At first sight, in the twinkling of an eye, I have formed my judgment of a man or woman for always.” He adds that “this is the characteristic of individuals with whom instinct is quick, active, instantaneous, inflexible. What, it will be asked, what is instinct? It is to be cognized as the highest reason—the innate reason, the reason that does not argue, the reason such as God has made and not what man finds out. It strikes us like the lightning without which the eye would have difficulty of searching it out. It illuminates everything at the first flash. The inspiration in all the arts, as upon the field of battle, is as this instinct, this reason that divines. Genius also is instinct and not logic and labor.”
Nevertheless he sets aside much that is often regarded as original, or inspired. This utterance is fit for the book ofEcclesiastes: “There is nothing new in nature and in the arts. Everything that is now being done has been done before; everything that is said has been said already; everything that is thought has been thought. Every century is the plagiarist of another century; for all that we are so much, artists or thinkers, perishable or fugitive, we copy in different ways from one immutable and eternal model,—nature, the thought, one and diverse, of the Creator.”
He had little to say in favor of the Greeks. “For me,” says he, “Greece is like a book the beauties of which are tarnished, because we have been made to read it before we were able to understand it. Nevertheless, the enchantment is not off from everything. There is still an echo of all those great names remaining in my heart. Something holy, sweet, fragrant, mounts up with the horizons in my soul. I thank God for having seen, while passing by this land, the country of the Doers of Great Deeds, as Epaminondas called his fatherland.”
He felt keenly a sense of isolation that he had no one to participate in these sentiments. “Always,” says he, “whena strong impression stirs my soul I feel the necessity to speak or to write to some one of what I am experiencing, to find in some degree a joy from my joy, an echoing of that which has impressed me. Isolated feeling is not complete: man has been created double. Ah! when I look around me, there is yet a void. Julia and Marianne fill everything for themselves alone; but Julia is still so young that I tell her only what is suited to her age. It is all future; it will soon be all present for us; but the past, where is it now?
“The person who would have most enjoyed my happiness at this moment, is my Mother. In everything that happened to me, pleasant or sad, my thought turns involuntarily to her. I believe I see her, hear her, talk to her, write to her. One who is remembered so much is not absent; whoever lives so completely, so powerfully in ourselves is not dead for us.”
“Empty dream! She is there no more; she is dwelling in the world of realities; our vagrant dreams are no more anything to her; but her spirit is with us, it visits us, it follows with us, it protects us:our conversation is with her in the eternal regions.”
He goes on to describe his condition.
“Before I had reached the age of maturity I had lost the greater part of those here below whom I most loved, or who most loved me. My love-life had become concentrated; my heart had only a few other hearts to take voyage with. My memory had little more than graves where it might rest here in the earth; I lived more with the dead than with the living. If God were to strike two or three of his blows around me, I feel that I would be detached entirely by myself, for I would contemplate myself no more. I would love myself only in the others; and it is only there that I can love.”
“One begins to feel the emptiness of existence from the day when he is no more necessary to anybody, from the hour when he can no more be dearly loved. The sole reality here below, I have always felt, is love, love under all its forms.”
“To us poets, beauty is evident and perceptible; we are not beings of abstraction, but men of nature and instinct; so I have travelled many times through Rome; so I have visited the seas and the mountains; so I have read the sages, the historians and the poets; so have I visited Athens.”
On the fifth of September the brig arrived at Bayreuth. Lamartine engaged a house for the season and established his family there while he travelled over the country. He had for a long time entertained grave doubts of his daughter’s health, and had brought her with him in the hope that a residence in Syria would restore her.
Ibrahim Pacha was at this time making his conquests, and at his orders, the French travellers were everywhere received with courtesy and the most generous hospitality.
The heat was too great for setting out at once, so Lamartine addressed a letter to Lady Hester Stanhope, asking permission to visit her. This lady had been the confidential secretary of her uncle, William Pitt, the famous minister, and was supposed to be betrothed to Sir John Moore. After their deaths she left Europe and made her home in the East. She had gained a certain authority over many of the Arabian chiefs who venerated her as an inspired person. She received Lamartine cordially, saying that their stars were friendly and in concurrence. He declined her offer to cast his horoscope or to have any discussion on matters of religion. “God alone possesses the truth,” said he, “we have only faith.”
“Believe what you please,” said she. “You are one of those men nevertheless that I expected, whom Providence has sent to me, and who have a grand part to perform in the work which is preparing.You will shortly go back to Europe; Europe is finished. France alone has as yet a grand mission to fulfill, and you will participate in it, I know not how.”
She added that he had four or five stars, and explained further: “You ought to be a poet; that is legible in your eyes and the upper part of your countenance. Lower down you are under the influence of different stars that are almost in opposition; there is an influence of energy and activity.”
She asked his name; she had never heard it before. She predicted that he would soon return to Europe, but would come back to the East, insisting that it was his fatherland. He acknowledged that it was the fatherland of his imagination.
Lamartine and his friends were hospitably entertained but she would not regard his departure as being more than for a season.
Forming a caravan at Bayreuth he set out on the eighth of October. At Jaffa or “Yaffa,” the governor had received letters from Mehemet Ali and Ibrahim Pacha, then masters in the East, commanding all the officials to aid him in his journey, to furnish escorts, and to supply him with every convenience that he required. When the caravan reached the “village of Jeremiah” it was met by Abu Gosh, the brigand chief. He demanded of Lamartine whether he was the Frank Emir, whom his friend, Lady Stanhope, the Queen of Palmyra, had placed under his protection, and in whose name had sent him the magnificent garment of cloth of gold in which he was then arrayed. Lamartine knew nothing of the gift but assured the chief that he was the man.
Abu Gosh at that time had the whole region of Southern Palestine in subjection clear to Jericho. He now provided a strong guard for the caravan.
Lamartine found no difficulty in identifying the places around Jerusalem. “Almost never,” says he, “did I encounter a place or object the first sight of which was not to me as what I remembered. Have we lived twice or a thousand times? Is our memory simply an impression that has been obscured, which the breath of God brings out again vividly? Or have we a faculty in our imagination to anticipate and perceive in advance before we actually do behold?”
The monks of the Convent of St. John the Baptist, in the wilderness of that name, received the travellers with sincere cordiality. Lamartine left there a part of his caravan, going on only with the Arabian and Egyptian guard. They confined their movements to visiting places in the suburbs, made historic by traditions of the New Testament.
He pays a deserved tribute to the Turks for their management of the “Holy Sepulchre.” Instead of destroying it, they had preserved everything, maintaining strict police regulations, and a silent reverence for the place which the Christians were far from manifesting. While the intolerance of the various sects would lead the triumphant party to exclude its rivals from the place, the Turks are impartial to them all.
The Mussulmans are the only tolerant people, he stoutly affirms. Let Christians ask what they would have done if the fortunes of war had delivered to them the City of Mecca and the Kaaba.
On the thirtieth of October, the caravan set out for the river Jordan and the Dead Sea. On returning to the neighborhood of Jerusalem, Lamartine received a letter from his wife that determined him to forego the extending of his journey into Egypt. He went back to Bayreuth, arriving the fifth of November.
Autumn in that country has the warmth, the renewing of vegetation and other conditions, like spring in the northerly climates of the temperate zone. Lamartine had purchased Arab horses of superb quality while in Palestine, andone for his daughter. It was at the end of November that he took her out for her first excursion with the animal. The air was exhilarating and the mountain scenery in its most attractive guise. In an ecstasy of excitement the young girl declared it the longest, most beautiful, most delightful ride that she had ever taken.
It was also the last. On the second of December she was taken suddenly ill and died the next day. The parents were overwhelmed with grief. The last hope of their house was thus cut off in the glad days of adolescence.
They remained at Bayreuth through the winter. On the fifteenth of April they set out for their return homeward and sailed for Constantinople.
Lamartine interspersed his narrative of this voyage with reflections upon what he observed and meditated. “I would like to sail all the while,” says he, “to have a voyage with its chances and distractions. But what I read in my wife’s eyes goes deep into my heart.[6]The suffering of a man is nothing like that of a woman, a mother. A woman lives and dies in one sole thought, or one solitary feeling. Life for a woman is a something possessed; death, a something lost. A man lives with everything that he has to do with, good or bad; God does not kill him with a blow.”
On the subject of travelling and sojourning abroad, he speaks philosophically:
“When a man is absent from his country, he sees affairs more perfectly. Details do not obstruct his view, and important matters present themselves in their entireness. This is the reason why prophets and oracles lived alone in the world and remote. They were sages who studied subjects in their entirety and their judgment was not warped by the little passions of the day. The statesman, likewise, if he would judge and foresee the outcome, must often absent himself from the scene in which he performs the Drama of his time. To predict is impossible, for foreknowledge is for God alone; but to foresee is possible, and forethought is for man.”
Lamartine analyzes closely the doctrines of Saint-Simonism, and what he considers their weak points. “We must not,” he says, “judge new ideas by the derision which they encounter during the period. All great thoughts were first received in the world as aliens. Saint-Simonism has in it a something true, grand and beautiful; the application of Christianity to civil society, the legislation of Human Brotherhood.
“From this point of view I am a Saint-Simonian.
“What has placed this Society under an eclipse, though not under death, is not the want of an idea, nor the lack of disciples. In my opinion it wants a leader, a master, a manager. If there should be found a man of genius and virtue who was religious and at the same time prudent, who would bring the two horizons into one field of vision which should be placed under the direction of the nascent ideas, I have no doubt that he would transform it into a potent reality. Times in which there is an anarchy of ideas, are favorable seasons for the germinating of new and heroic thoughts.
“Society, to the eye of the philosopher, is in a state of disorder. It has neither direction, object nor leader; and it is reduced accordingly to the instinct of conservatism. A sect that is religious, moral, social and political,—that has a creed, a watchword, an object, a leader, and mind, if it were to advance compactly and directly at the midst of the disordered ranks in the present social order, would inevitably gain the victory. But it must bring safety and not ruin, attacking only what is injurious and not that which helps, and calling religionback to reason and love, prudence and Christian Brotherhood, having universal charity and usefulness as its only title and only foundation.
“A law-maker requires young men ardent in zeal and on fire with the hunger for faith, from which however, senseless dogmas have been rejected. The organizers of Saint-Simonism have taken for their first article of belief: war to the death between the family, property and religion on one hand and ourselves on the other. They ought to perish. The world, by the force of speech is not conquered; it is to be converted, stirred, wrought into activity, changed.
“So long as an idea is not practical, it is not presentable to the world of society. Human nature goes from the known to the unknown, but not from the known to the absurd. That will be held back in the subordinate effort. Before great revolutions, the signs are to be seen on the earth and in the sky. The Saint-Simonians have had one class of those signs: they have broken up as a body, and they are now more slowly at work making leaders and soldiers for the new army.”
The vessel and its convoy arrived in the Bosphorus on the twenty-fifth day of May. Lamartine, his wife and friends now took up their residence at Buyukdéré, for the next two months. During this period they were recipients of the most friendly attentions. The Grand Seigneur himself, and the principal officials at Constantinople extended courtesies and cordial demonstrations, exceeding any that had ever before been bestowed to “Franks.” This was in recognition of the substantial help which had been given to prevent the further dismemberment of the Ottoman empire. Lamartine had been heralded everywhere as a personage of distinction, and his reception was warm and cordial, almost as if he had been a royal prince. His opinions were treasured, and his advice eagerly sought by the ministers and representatives of the Government. He was admitted to places from which other Europeans had been excluded, and so long as he remained in Turkish territory, every necessary provision was made for his safety and honorable recognition.
His journal of the voyage records minutely the occurrences and observations which thus came within his notice.
“Whoso takes good advice is secure from falling; but whoso rejects it, falleth into the pit of his own conceit.”
Gems from the East.