He interested himself, also, in steam navigation. When Fulton was in England he was in frequent communication with his English friend, to whom he despatched a triumphant letter on the evening of his first voyage on the Hudson. This letter, having been shown to Earl Stanhope and some eminent engineers, was treated by them with derision as describing an impossibility. Sir R. Phillips then advertised for a company, to repeat on the Thames what had become an accomplished fact on the American rivers. After expenditure of a large sum of money in advertising he obtained only two ten-pound conditional subscribers. He then printed, with commendation, Fulton’s letters in the Monthly Magazine, and his credulity was almost universally reprobated. It is worth recording that, in the first steam voyage from the Clyde to the Thames, Phillips, three of his family, and five or six others, were the only passengers who had the courage to test the experiment. To allay the public alarms he published a letter in the newspapers, and before the end of that summer he saw the same packet set out on its voyage with 350 passengers.[252]
In 1840, the year following the final edition of his most popular book, he died at Brighton in the seventy-third year of his age. During his busy life if, by his reforming energy, he had raised up some bitter enemies and detractors, he had made, on the other hand, some valuable friendships. Amongst these—not the least noteworthy—is his intimate friendship with that most humane-minded lawyer, Lord Erskine, one of those who have best adorned the legal profession in this country.
XLIII.
LAMARTINE. 1790–1869.
OF aristocratic descent, and educated at the college of the “Fathers of the Faith” (Pères de la Foi), Du Prat—such was the name of his family—imbibed in his youth principles very different from those of his great literary contemporary Michelet. Happily, Nature seems to have endowed his mother with a rare refinement and humaneness of feeling; and from her example and instruction he derived, apparently, the germs of those loftier ideas which, in maturer age, characterise a great part of his writings. While the first Napoléon was still emperor, he entered the army, from which he soon retired to employ his leisure in the more congenial amusement of travel.
In 1820 he first came before the world as the author of Méditations Poétiques, of which, within four years, 45,000 copies were sold, and the new poet was eagerly welcomed by the party of Reaction, who thought to find in him a future successor to the brilliant author of the Génie du Christianisme, the literary hope of their party, and the champion of the Church and royalty—the political counterbalance to Béranger, the poet of the Revolution—for Hugo had not yet raised the standard of revolt. Yet this remarkable volume with the greatest difficulty found its way into print. “A young man, [writes one of his biographers] his health scarcely re-established from a cruel malady, his face pale with suffering and covered with a veil of sadness, through which could be read the recent loss of an adored being, went about from publisher to publisher, carrying a small packet of verses dyed with tears. Everywhere the poetry and the poet were politely bowed out. At length, a bookseller, better advised, or seduced by the infinite grace of the young poet, decided to accept the manuscript so often rejected.” It was published without a name and without recommendation. The melancholy beauty of the style, and the melody of the rhythm, could not fail to attract sympathy from readers of taste and feeling, even from those opposed to his political prejudices—“A rhythm of a celestial melody, verse supple, cadenced, and sonorous, which softly vibrates as an Æolian harp sighing in the evening breeze.”
Its political, rather than its poetical, recommendations, we may presume, gained for the writer from the Government of Louis XVIII. a diplomatic post at Florence, which he held until the dynastic revolution of 1830. For some short time he acted as secretary to the French Embassy in London, and during his stay in England he made the acquaintance of a rich Englishwoman, whom he afterwards married at Florence. A legacy of valuable property from an uncle, upon the condition of his assuming the name of Lamartine, still further enriched him.
In 1829 appeared the collection of Harmonies Poétiques et Réligieuses, in which, as in all his poetry up to this time, one of the most characteristic features is his devotion to Legitimacy and the Church. The renversement of 1830 considerably modified his political and ecclesiastical ideas. “I wish,” he declared at this turning-point in his career, “to enter the ranks of the people; to think, speak, act, and struggle with them.” One of the first proofs of his advanced opinions was his pamphlet advocating abolition of “capital” punishment. He failed to obtain a seat in the Chambre des Députés of Louis Philippe, whether in consequence of this advocacy or by reason of his antecedent politics. His enforced leisure he employed in travelling, and in 1832, with his English wife and their young daughter Juliette (whose death at Beyrout caused him inconsolable grief), he set sail for the East in a vessel equipped and armed at his own expense. A narrative of these travels he published in his Voyage en Orient (1835). In the following year appeared his Jocelyn, a poem of charming tenderness and eloquence, and, in 1838, La Chute d’un Ange (“The Fall of an Angel”), in which he, for the first time, gives expression to his feeling of revolt from the barbarisms of the Slaughter-House. In this strikingly original poem, one of the most remarkable of its kind in any language, Lamartine discovers to us that he no longer views human institutions, the customs of society, and the consecrated usages of nations through the rose-coloured medium of traditional prejudice. It is penetrated with a deep consciousness of the injustice and falseness of a large proportion of those things which are tolerated, and even approved, under the sanction of religious or social law, and with ardent indignation against cruelty and selfishness. In the frightful representation of the practices of the early tyrants of the world saved from the “universal deluge,” he allows us to see his own feeling. One of more humane race thus addresses his charming heroine Daïdha:—
“Ces hommes, pour apaiser leur faim,
N’ont pas assez des fruits que Dieu mit sous leur main.