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's Génie du Christianisme versified. 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 poem La 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, entitled L'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 entitled L'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."