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 poem Le 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 in Chant 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 the coup d'état drives 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 his Odes et Ballades Hugo, 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."
