The pensive poet even makes poetry on the subject, twenty years afterward, poetry which, in his customary triplets of expression, he calls “the balm of a wound, the dew of a heart, the perfume of a sepulchral flower.” He wrote it, he says, “with streaming eyes.” He prints his stanzas—for Lamartine is eminently of those who, as it has been said, weep in print and wipe their eyes with the public—and with a sigh, says:
Thus did I expiate by these written tears the cruelty and ingratitude of my heart of nineteen. I have never been able to reperuse these verses without adoring that youthful image which the transparent and plaintive waves of the Gulf of Naples will roll eternally before my eyes ... and without detesting myself! But souls forgive on high. Hers has forgiven me. Forgive me also, you!—I have wept.
We ought not to disturb, with any further words of our own, the impression of himself which Lamartine has now made on the reader. He has given us here his own true image. He is the weeping poet. It is fit—let him dissolve, let him exhale, from view in tears.
Lachrymose Lamartine, farewell!
XXIII.
THE GROUP OF 1830.
VICTOR HUGO: 1802-1885; SAINTE-BEUVE: 1804-1869; BALZAC: 1799-1850; GEORGE SAND: 1804-1876; DE MUSSET: 1810-1857.
As a convenient method of inclusion and condensation for a number of authors who must by no means be omitted, but for whom there is left little room in these pages, we adopt the plan of making a cluster of important names to be treated in a single chapter. The political and the literary history of France join a sort of synchronism with one another at a certain point of time, which makes this arrangement not only feasible but natural.