The year 1822 is memorable; it saw the appearance of Vigny's Poèmes, the Odes of Hugo, which announced a new power in literature, though the direction of that power was not yet defined, and almost to the same moment belongs the indictment of classical literature by Henri Beyle ("Stendhal") in his study entitled Racine et Shakespeare. Around Charles Nodier, in the library of the Arsenal, gathered the young revolters—among them Vigny, Sainte-Beuve, Émile Deschamps, afterwards the translator of Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth, his brother Antony, afterwards the translator of the Divine Comedy. The first Cénacle was formed; in the Muse Française and in the Globe the principles of the new literary school were expounded and illustrated. Victor Hugo looked on with friendly intentions, but still held aloof.
JEAN-PIERRE DE BÉRANGER (1780-1857) was not one of this company of poets. A child of Paris, of humble parentage, he discovered, after various experiments, that his part was not that of a singer of large ambitions. In 1815 his first collection of Chansons appeared; the fourth appeared in 1833. Standing between the bourgeoisie and the people, he mediated between the popular and the middle-class sentiment. His songs flew like town sparrows from garret to garden; impudent or discreet, they nested everywhere. They seemed to be the embodied wisdom of good sense, good temper, easy morals, love without its ardours, poverty without its pains, patriotism without its fatigues, a religion on familiar terms with the Dieu des bonnes gens. In his elder years a Béranger legend had evolved itself; he was the sage of democracy, the Socrates of the people, the patriarch to whom pilgrims travelled to receive the oracles of liberal and benevolent philosophy. Notwithstanding his faults in the pseudo-classic taste, Béranger was skilled in the art of popular song; he knew the virtue of concision; he knew how to evolve swiftly his little lyric drama; he knew how to wing his verses with a volant refrain; he could catch the sentiment of the moment and of the multitude; he could be gay with touches of tenderness, and smile through a tear reminiscent of departed youth and pleasure and Lisette. For the good bourgeois he was a liberal in politics and religion; for the people he was a democrat who hated the Restoration, loved equality more than liberty, and glorified the legendary Napoleon, representative of democratic absolutism. In the history of politics the songs of Béranger count for much; in the history of literature the poet has a little niche of his own, with which one may be content who, if he had not in elder years supposed himself the champion of a literary revolution, might be called modest.
II
Among the members of the Cénacle was to be seen a poet already famous, their elder by several years, who might have been the master of a school had he not preferred to dwell apart; one who, born for poetry, chose to look on verse as no more than an accident of his existence. In the year 1820 had appeared a slender volume entitled Méditations Poétiques. The soul, long departed, returned in this volume to French poetry. Its publication was an event hardly less important than that of the Génie du Christianisme. The well-springs of pure inspiration once more flowed. The critics, indeed, were not all enthusiastic; the public, with a surer instinct, recognised in Lamartine the singer they had for many years desired, and despaired to find.
ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE, born at Mâcon in 1790, of royalist parents, had passed his childhood among the tranquil fields and little hills around his homestead at Milly. From his mother he learned to love the Bible, Tasso, Bernardin, and a christianised version of the Savoyard Vicar's faith; at a later time he read Chateaubriand, Rousseau, Milton, Byron, and was enchanted by the wandering gleams and glooms of Ossian. From the melancholy of youth he was roused by Italian travel, and by that Italian love romance of Graziella, the circumstances of which he has dignified for the uses of idealised autobiography. A deeper passion of love and grief followed; Madame Charles, the "Julie" of Lamartine's Raphaël, the "Elvire" of his Méditations, died. Lamartine had versified already in a manner which has affinities with that of those eighteenth-century poets and elegiac singers of the Empire whom he was to banish from public regard. Love and grief evoked finer and purer strains; his deepest feelings flowed into verse with perfect sincerity and perfect spontaneity. Without an effort of the will he had become the most illustrious poet of France.
Lamartine had held and had resigned a soldier's post in the body-guard of Louis XVIII. He now accepted the position of attaché to the embassy at Naples; published in 1823 his Nouvelles Méditations, and two years later Le Dernier Chant du Pèlerinage d'Harold (Byron's Childe Harold); after which followed a long silence. Secretary in 1824 to the legation at Florence, he abandoned after a time the diplomatic career, and on the eve of the Revolution of July (1830) appeared again as a poet in his Harmonies Poétiques et Religieuses; travelled in the East in company with his wife, and recorded his impressions in the Voyage en Orient; entered into political life, at first a solitary in politics as he had been in literature, but by degrees finding himself drawn more and more towards democratic ideas. "Where will you sit?" he was asked on his presentation in the Chamber. His smiling reply, "On the ceiling," was symbolical of the fact; but from "the ceiling" his exalted oratory, generous in temper, sometimes wise and well informed, descended with influence. Jocelyn (1836), La Chute d'un Ange (1838), the Recueillements Poétiques (1839), closed the series of his poetical works, though he did not wholly cease from song.
In 1847 Lamartine's idealising Histoire des Girondins, brilliant in its romantic portraiture, had the importance of a political event. The Revolution of February placed him for a little time at the head of affairs; as he had been the soul of French poetry, so for a brief hour he was the soul of the political life of France. With the victory of imperialism Lamartine retired into the shade. He was more than sixty years of age; he had lost his fortune and was burdened with debt. His elder years were occupied with incessant improvisations for the booksellers—histories, biographies, tales, criticism, autobiographic confidences flowed from his pen. It was a gallant struggle and a sad one. Through the delicate generosity of Napoleon III. he was at length relieved without humiliating concessions. In 1869 Lamartine died in his eightieth year.
He was a noble dreamer in practical affairs, and just ideas formed a portion of his dreams. Nature had made him an irreclaimable optimist; all that is base and ugly in life passed out of view as he soared above earth in his luminous ether. Sadness and doubt indeed he knew, but his sadness had a charm of its own, and there were consolations in maternal nature, in love, in religious faith and adoration. His power of vision was not intense or keen; his descriptions are commonly vague or pale; but no one could mirror more faithfully a state of feeling divested of all material circumstance. The pure and ample harmonies of his verse do not attack the ear, but they penetrate to the soul. All the great lyric themes—God, nature, death, glory, melancholy, solitude, regret, desire, hope, love—he interpreted on his instrument with a musician's inspiration. Unhappily he lacked the steadfast force of will, the inexhaustible patience, which go to make a complete artist; he improvised admirably; he refused to labour as a master of technique; hence his diffuseness, his negligences; hence the decline of his powers after the first spontaneous inspiration was exhausted.
Lamartine may have equalled but he never surpassed the best poems of his earliest volume. But the elegiac singer aspired to be a philosophic poet, and, infusing his ideas into sentiment and narrative, became the author of Jocelyn and La Chute d'un Ange. Recalling and idealising an episode in the life of his friend the Abbé Dumont, he tells how Jocelyn, a child of humble parents—not yet a priest—takes shelter among the mountains from the Revolutionary terror; how a proscribed youth, Laurence, becomes his companion; how Laurence is found to be a girl; how friendship passes into love; how, in order that he may receive the condemned bishop's last confession, Jocelyn submits to become a priest; how the lovers part; how Laurence wanders into piteous ways of passion; how Jocelyn attends her in her dying hours, and lays her body among the hills and streams of their early love. It is Jocelyn who chronicles events and feelings in his journal of joy and of sorrow. Lamartine acknowledges that he had before him as a model the idyl dear to him in childhood—Bernardin's Paul et Virginie.
The poem is complete in itself, but it was designed as a fragment of that vast modern epopee, with humanity for the hero, of which La Chute d'un Ange was another fragment. The later poem, vast in dimensions, fantastic in subject, negligent in style, is a work of Lamartine's poetic decline. We are among the mountains of Lebanon, where dwell the descendants of Cain. The angel, enamoured of the maiden Daïdha, becomes human. Through gigantic and incoherent inventions looms the idea of humanity which degrades itself by subjugation to the senses, as in Jocelyn we had seen the type of humanity which ascends by virtue of aspirations of the soul. It was a poor jest to say that the title of his poem La Chute d'un Ange described its author. Lamartine had failed; he could not handle so vast a subject with plastic power; but in earlier years he had accomplished enough to justify us in disregarding a late failure—he had brought back the soul to poetry.