Lamartine's political career did not, at first, interfere with his literary occupation, it was merely an agreeable pastime—a respite from his most ardent and congenial labors. In 1835 appeared his "Souvenirs, impressions, pensées et paysages pendant un voyage en Orient, &c."[6] This work, though written from personal observations, is any thing but a description of travels, or a faithful delineation of Eastern scenery or character. It is all poetry, without a sufficient substratum of reality—a dream of the Eastern world with its primitive vigor and sadness, but wholly destitute of either antiquarian research or living pictures. Lamartine gives us a picture of the East by candle-light—a high-wrought picture, certainly; but after all nothing but canvas. Shortly after this publication, there appeared his "Jocelyn, journal trouvé chez un curé de village,"[7] a sort of imitation of the Vicar of Wakefield; but with scarcely an attempt at a faithful delineation of character. Lamartine has nothing to do with the village parson, who may be a very ordinary personage; his priest is an ideal priest, who inculcates the doctrines of ideal Christianity in ideal sermons without a text. Lamartine seems to have an aversion to all positive forms, and dislikes the dogma in religion as much as he did the principles of the Doctrinaires. It would fetter his genius or oblige it to take a definite direction, which would be destructive to its essence.
As late as in 1838 Lamartine published his "La chute d'un age."[8] This is one of his poorest productions, though exhibiting vast powers of imagination and productive genius. The scene is laid in a chaotic antediluvian world, inhabited by Titans, and is, perhaps, descriptive of the author's mind, full of majestic imagery, but as yet undefined, vague, and without an object worthy of its efforts. Lamartine's time had not yet come, though he required but a few years to complete the fiftieth anniversary of his birth.
The year following, in 1839, he published his "Recueillements poétiques," which must be looked upon as the commencement of a new era in his life. Mahomed was past forty when he undertook to establish a new religion, and built upon it a new and powerful empire; Lamartine was nearly fifty when he left the fantastic for the real; and from the inspiration without an object, returned to the only real poetry in this world—the life of man. Lamartine, who until that period had been youthful in his conceptions, and wild and bizarre in his fancy, did not, as Voltaire said of his countrymen, pass "from childhood to old age," but paused at a green manhood, with a definite purpose, and the mighty powers of his mind directed to an object large enough to afford it scope for its most vigorous exercise. His muse was now directed to the interests of humanity; he was what the French call un poete humanitaire.
Thus far it was proper for us to follow the life of the poet to understand that of the statesman, orator, and tribune. Men like Lamartine must be judged in their totality, not by single or detached acts of their lives. Above all men it is the poet who is a self-directing agent, whose faculties receive their principal impulse from within, and who stamps his own genius on every object of his mental activity. Schiller, after writing the history of the most remarkable period preceding the French Revolution, "the thirty years' war," (for liberty of conscience,) and "the separation of the Netherlands from the crown of Spain," felt that his energies were not yet exhausted on the subject; but his creative genius found no theatre of action such as was open to Lamartine in the French Chamber, in the purification of the ideas engendered by the Revolution; and he had therefore to content himself with bringing his poetical conceptions on the stage. Instead of becoming an actor in the great world-drama, he gave us his Wallenstein and Don Carlos; Lamartine gave us himself as the best creation of his poetic genius. The poet Lamartine has produced the statesman. This it will be necessary to bear in mind, to understand Lamartine's career in the Chamber of Deputies, or the position he now holds at the head of the provisional government.
Lamartine, as we have above observed, entered the French Chamber in 1833, as a cosmopolite, full of love for mankind, full of noble ideas of human destiny, and deeply impressed with the degraded social condition not only of his countrymen, but of all civilized Europe. He knew and felt that the Revolution which had destroyed the social elements of Europe, or thrown them in disorder, had not reconstructed and arranged them; and that the re-organization of society on the basis of humanity and mutual obligation, was still an unfinished problem. Lamartine felt this; but did the French Chambers, as they were then organized, offer him a fair scope for the development of his ideas, or the exercise of his genius? Certainly not. The French Chamber was divided into two great dynastic interests—those of the younger and elder Bourbons. The Republican party (the extreme left) was small, and without an acknowledged leader; and the whole assembly, with few individual exceptions, had taken a material direction. During seventeen years—from 1830 to 1847—no organic principle of law or politics was agitated in the Chambers, no new ideas evolved. The whole national legislation seemed to be directed toward material improvements, to the exclusion of every thing that could elevate the soul or inspire the masses with patriotic sentiments. The government of Louis Philippe had at first become stationary, then reactionary; the mere enunciation of a general idea inspired its members with terror, and made the centres (right and left) afraid of the horrors of the guillotine. The government of Louis Philippe was not a reign of terror, like that of 1793, but it was a reign of prospective terror, which it wished to avoid. Louis Philippe had no faith in the people; he treated them as the keeper of a menagerie would a tame tiger—he knew its strength, and he feared its vindictiveness. To disarm it, and to change its ferocious nature, he checked the progress of political ideas, instead of combating them with the weapons of reason, and banished from his counsel those who alone could have served as mediators between the throne and the liberties of the nation. The French people seemed stupified at the contre-coups to all their hopes and aspirations. Even the more moderate complained; but their complaints were hushed by the immediate prospect of an improved material condition. All France seemed to have become industrious, manufacturing, mercantile, speculating. The thirst for wealth had succeeded to the ambition of the Republicans, the fanaticism of the Jacobins, and the love of distinction of the old monarchists. The Chamber of Deputies no longer represented the French people—its love, its hatred, its devotion—the elasticity of its mind, its facility of emotion, its capacity to sacrifice itself for a great idea. The Deputies had become stock-jobbers, partners in large enterprises of internal improvements, and timidly conservative, as are always the representatives of mere property. The Chamber, instead of representing the essence of the nation, represented merely the moneyed classes of society.
Such was the Chamber of Deputies to which Lamartine was chosen by an electoral college, devoted to the Dynastic opposition. He entered it in 1833, not a technical politician or orator as Odillon Barrot, not as a skillful tactitioner like Thiers, not as a man with one idea as the Duke de Broglie, not as the funeral orator of departed grandeur like Berryer, nor as the embodiment of a legal abstraction like Dupin, or a man of the devouring ambition and skill in debate of François Pierre Guillaume Guizot: Lamartine was simply a humanitaire. Goaded by the sarcasm of Cormenin, he declared that he belonged to no party, that he sought for no parliamentary conquest—that he wished to triumph through the force of ideas, and through no power of persuasion. He was the very counterpart of Thiers, the most sterile orator and statesman of France. Lamartine had studied the French Revolution, he saw the anarchical condition of society, and the ineffectual attempt to compress instead of organizing it; and he conceived the noble idea of collecting the scattered fragments, and uniting them into a harmonious edifice. While the extreme left were employed in removing the pressure from above, Lamartine was quietly employed in laying the foundation of a new structure, and called himself un démocrate conservateur.[9] He spoke successfully and with great force against the political monopoly of real property, against the prohibitive system of trade, against slavery, and the punishment of death.[10] His speeches made him at once a popular character; he did not address himself to the Chamber, he spoke to the French people, in language that sunk deep into the hearts of the masses, without producing a striking effect in the Legislature. At that time already had the king singled him out from the rest of the opposition. He wished to secure his talents for his dynasty; but Lamartine was not in search of a portefeuille, and escaped without effort from the temptation.
In November, 1837, he was re-elected to the Chamber from Bergues and Mâcon, his native town. He decided in favor of the latter, and took his seat as a member for that place. He supported the Molé ministry, not because he had become converted to the new dynasty, but because he despised the Doctrinaires, who, by their union with the Liberals, brought in the new Soult ministry. He was not satisfied with the purity of motives, he also wanted proper means to attain a laudable object. In the Oriental question, which was agitated under Soult, Lamartine was not felt. His opposition was too vague and undefined: instead of pointing to the interests of France, he pointed to the duties of humanity of a great nation; he read Milton in a counting-room, and a commercial Maclaurin asked him "what does it prove?"
In 1841 his talent as an orator (he was never distinguished as a debater) was afforded ample scope by Thiers' project to fortify the capital. He opposed it vehemently, but without effect. In the boisterous session of 1842 he acted the part of a moderator; but still so far seconded the views of Thiers as to consider the left bank of the Rhine as the proper and legitimate boundary of France against Germany. This debate, it is well known, produced a perfect storm of popular passions in Germany. In a few weeks the whole shores of the Rhine were bristling with bayonets; the peasantry in the Black Forest began to clean and polish their rusty muskets, buried since the fall of Napoleon, and the princes perceiving that the spirit of nationality was stronger than that of freedom, encouraged this popular declaration against French usurpation. Nicolas Becker, a modest German, without pretension or poetic genius, but inspired by an honest love of country and national glory, then composed a war-song, commencing thus:
No, never shall they have it,
The free, the German Rhine;