His "Genius of Christianity", published in 1802, reconciled Napoleon
with the clergy, and his work, "Bonaparte and the Bourbons," was by
Louis XVIII. himself pronounced "equal to an army."]
After the dismission of Chateaubriand from the ministry, in July,
1824, Lamartine became Secretary to the French Legation at Florence.
Here he wrote "_Le dernier chant du pelerinage d'Harold_," (the Last
Song of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage,) which was published in Paris in
1825. Some allusions to Italy which occur in this poem, caused him a
duel with Col. Pepe, a relation of General Pepe--who had commanded the
Neapolitan Insurgents--in which he was severely wounded. In the same
year he published his "_Chant du Sacre_," (Chant of the Coronation,)
in honor of Charles X., just about the time that his contemporary,
Beranger, was preparing for publication his "_Chansons inedittes_,"
containing the most bitter sarcasm on Charles X., and for which the
great _Chansonnier_ was afterward condemned to nine month's
imprisonment, and a fine of 10,000 francs. The career of Lamartine
commences in 1830, after he had been made a member of the Academy,
when Beranger's muse went to sleep, because, with Charles X.'s flight
from France, he declared his mission accomplished. Delavigne, in 1829,
published his _Marino Falieri_.
While in London, Lamartine married a young English lady, as handsome
as _spirituelle_, who had conceived a strong affection for him through
his poems, which she appreciated far better than his compeer,
Chateaubriand, and requited with the true _troubadour's_ reward. With
the accession of Louis Philippe, Lamartine left the public service and
traveled through Turkey, Egypt, and Syria. Here he lost his daughter,
a calamity which so preyed on his mind that it would have
incapacitated him for further intellectual efforts, had he not been
suddenly awakened to a new sphere of usefulness. The town of Bergues,
in the Department of the North, returned him, in his absence, to the
Chamber of Deputies. He accepted the place, and was subsequently again
returned from his native town, Macon, which he represented at the
period of the last Revolution, which has called him to the head of the
provisional government.
It is here worthy of remark, that Lamartine, from the commencement of
his political career, did not take that interest in public affairs
which seriously interferred with his poetical meditations; on the
contrary, it was his muse which gave direction to his politics. He
took a poetical view of religion, politics, morals, society, and
state; the Chambers were to him but the medium for the realization of
his beaux ideals. But it must not be imagined that Lamartine's beaux
ideals had a distinct form, definitive outlines, or distinguishing
lights and shades. His imagination has never been plastic, and his
fancy was far better pleased with the magnitude of objects than with
the artistical arrangement of their details. His conceptions were
grand; but he possessed little power of elaboration; and this
peculiarity of his intellect he carried from literature into politics.
Shortly after his becoming a member of the French Academy, he
publishes his "_Harmonies politiques et religieuses._"[5] Between the
publication of these "Harmonies," and the "Poetical Meditations," with
which he commenced his literary career, lies a cycle of ten years; but
no perceptible intellectual progress or developement. True, the first
effusions of a poet are chiefly marked by intensity of feeling and
depth of sentiment. (What a world of emotions does not pervade
Schiller's "Robbers," or Goethe's "Goetz of Berlichingen, with the iron
hand!") but the subsequent productions must show some advancement
toward objective reality, without which it is impossible to
individualize even genius. To _our_ taste, the "Meditations" are
superior to his "Harmonies," in other words, we prefer his praeludium
to the concert. The one leaves us full of expectation, the other
disappoints us. Lamartine's religion is but a sentiment; his politics
at that time were but a poetical conception of human society. His
religion never reached the culmination point of _faith_; his politics
were never condensed into a system; his liquid sympathies for mankind
never left a precipitate in the form of an absorbing patriotism. When
his contemporary, Beranger, electrified the masses by his "_Roi
d'Yvetot_," and "_le Senateur_," (in 1813,) Lamartine quietly mused in
Naples, and in 1814 entered the body guard of Louis XVIII., when
Cormenin resigned his place as counsellor of state, to serve as a
volunteer in Napoleon's army.
[Footnote 5: Political and Religious Harmonies. Paris, 1830. 2 vols.]
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, pensees 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 trouve chez un cure 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.
[Footnote 6: Souvenirs, Impressions, Thoughts and Landscapes, during a
Voyage in the East. Paris, 1835. 4 vols.]
[Footnote 7: Jocelyn, a Journal found at the House of a Village
Priest. Paris, 1836. 2 vols.]
[Footnote 8: The Fall of an Angel. Paris, 1838. 2 vols.]
The year following, in 1839, he published his "_Recueillements
poetiques_," 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 Francois
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 democrate 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
Macon, his native town. He decided in favor of the latter, and took
his seat as a member for that place. He supported the Mole 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?"
[Footnote 9: A conservative Democrat.]
[Footnote 10: He had already, in 1830, published a pamphlet, _Contre
la peine de mort au peuple du 19 Octobre, 1830_. (Against the
Punishment of Death to the People of the 19th October, 1830.)]
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;
which was soon in every man's mouth, and being set to music, became
for a short period the German Marseillaise. Lamartine answered the
German with the _Marseillaise de paix_, (the Marseillaise of peace,)
which produced a deep impression; and the fall of the Thiers' ministry
soon calmed the warlike spirit throughout Europe.
On the question of the Regency, Lamartine declared himself in favor of
the Duchess of Orleans as Regent, should Louis Philippe die during the
minority of the Count of Paris, and it is our firm belief that he
would have accepted that Regency even in February last, if the king
had abdicated a day sooner. Lamartine never avowed himself a
Republican; but was left no alternative but to eclipse himself
forever, or become its champion.
The star of Lamartine's political destiny rose in the session of 1843,
when, utterly disgusted with the reactionary policy of Guizot, he
conceived the practical idea of uniting all the elements of
opposition, of whatever shade and color, against the government. But
he was not satisfied with this movement in the Chamber, which produced
the coalition of the Dynastic right with the Democratic left, and for
a moment completely paralyzed the administration of Guizot: he carried
his new doctrine right before the people, as the legitimate source of
the Chamber, and thus became the first political agitator of France
since the restoration, in the legitimate, legal, English sense of the
word. Finding that the press was muzzled, or subsidized and bought, he
moved his countrymen through the power of his eloquence. He appealed
from the Chamber to the sense and the virtue of the people. In
September, 1843, he first addressed the electors of Macon on the
necessity of extending the franchise, in order to admit of a greater
representation of the French people--generous, magnanimous, bold and
devoted to their country. Instead of fruitlessly endeavoring to reform
the government, he saw that the time had come for reforming the
Chamber.
In the month of October, of the same year--so rapidly did his new
political genius develop itself--he published a regular programme for
the opposition; a thing which Thiers, up to that moment, had
studiously avoided, not to break entirely with the king, and to render
himself still "possible" as a minister of the crown. Lamartine knew no
such selfish consideration, which has destroyed Thiers as a man of the
people, and declared himself entirely independent of the throne of
July. He advocated openly _the abolition of industrial feudalism, and
the foundation of a new democratic society under a constitutional
throne_.
Thus, then, had Lamartine separated himself not only from the king and
his ministers, but also from the ancient _noblesse_ and the
_bourgeoisie_, without approaching or identifying himself with the
Republican left wing of the Chamber. He stood alone, admired for his
genius, his irreproachable rectitude, his devoted patriotism, but
considered rather as a poetical abstraction, an impracticable Utopist;
and yet he was the only man in the Chamber who had devised a
practical means of regenerating the people and the government.
Lamartine was now considered a parliamentary oddity rather than the
leader of a faction, or the representative of a political principle;
but he was indeed far in advance of the miserable routine of his
colleagues. He personated, indeed, no principle represented in the
Chamber, but he was already the Tribune of the unrepresented masses!
The people had declared the government a fraud--the Chamber an
embodied falsehood. At last Marrast, one of the editors of the
National, (now a member of the provisional government,) pronounced it
in his paper that the French people had no representation, that it was
in vain to attempt to oppose the government in the legislature: "_La
Chambre_," said Marrast, "_n'est qu' un mensonge_."[11]
Lamartine had thus, all at once, as if by a _coup-de-main_, become "a
popular greatness." He was the man of the people, without having
courted popularity--that stimulus (as he himself called it) to so many
noble acts and crimes, as the object of its caresses remains its
conscious master or its pandering slave. Lamartine grew rapidly in
public estimation, because he was a new man. All the great characters
of the Chamber, beginning with Casimir Perrier, had, in contact with
Louis Philippe, become either eclipsed or tarnished. Lamartine avoided
the court, but openly and frankly confessed that he belonged to no
party. He had boldly avowed his determination to oppose the government
of Louis Philippe, not merely this or that particular direction, which
it took in regard to its internal and external relations; but in its
whole general tendency. He was neither the friend nor the enemy of a
particular combination for the ministry, and had, during a short
period, given his support to Count Mole, not because he was satisfied
with his administration, but because he thought the opposition and its
objects less virtuous than the minister. In this independent position,
supported by an ample private fortune, (inherited, as we before
observed, by his maternal uncle, and the returns of his literary
activity,) Lamartine became an important element of parliamentary
combination, from the weight of his _personal_ influence, while at the
same time his "utopies," as they were termed by the tactitioners of
Alphonse Thiers, gave but little umbrage to the ambition of his
rivals. He alone enjoyed some credit with the masses, though his
social position ranked with the first in the country, while, from the
peculiar bend of his mind, and the idealization of his principles, he
was deemed the most harmless aspirant to political power. The
practical genius of the opposition, everlastingly occupied with
unintellectual details of a venal class-legislature, saw in Lamartine
a useful co-operator: they never dreamt that the day would come when
they would be obliged to serve under him.
[Footnote 11: The Chamber is but a lie.]