Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 14.djvu/246

 234 L A M L matter be very closely analysed it will be found that he added hardly anything of his own. But if the parts of the mixture were like other things the mixture itself was not. It seemed indeed to the immediate generation so original that tradition has it that the Meditations were refused by a publisher because they were in none of the accepted styles. They appeared, as has been said, in 1820, that is to say, when Lamartine was nearly thirty years old. The best of them and the best thing that Lamartine overdid is the famous Lac, describing his return to the little mountain tarn of Le Bourget after the death of his mistress, with whom he had visited it in other days. The verse is exquisitely harmonious, the sentiments conven tional but refined and delicate, the imagery well chosen and grace fully expressed. There is indeed an unquestionable want of vigour, but to readers of that day the want of vigour was entirely compen sated by the presence of freshness and grace. Lamartine s chief misfortune in poetry was that not only was his note a somewhat weak one, but that he could strike but one. The four volumes of the Meditations, the Harmonies, and the Rccucillcmcnts, which con tained the prime of his verse, are perhaps the most monotonous reading to be found anywhere in work of equal bulk by a poet of equal talent. They contain nothing but meditative lyrical pieces, almost any one of which is typical of the whole, though there is of course considerable variation of merit. The two narrative poems which succeeded the early lyrics, Jocelyn and the Chute d iin Ange, were, according to Lamartine s original plan, parts of a vast Epic of the Ages,&quot; some further fragments of which survive, especially one of not a little merit which was published four years after ths author s death in company with some youthful attempts at the classical tragedy and a few miscellanea. Jocelyn had at one time more popularity in England than most French verse. La Chute cl uii Aiige, in which the Byronic influence is more obvious than in any other of Lamartine s works, is more ambitious in theme and less regulated by scrupulous conditions of delicacy in handling than most of its author s poetry. It does, however, little more than prove that such audacities were not for him. As a prose writer Lamartine was, as may be seen from what has been said (and many of his works have not been mentioned), very fertile. His characteristics in his prose fiction and descriptive work are not very different from those of his poetry. He is always and everywhere sentimental, though very frequently, as in his shorter prose tales (The Stone Mason of St Point, Graziella, &c. ), he is grace ful as well as sentimental. In his histories, the style being one for which he was radically unfitted, the effect is worse. It has been hinted that Lamartine s personal narratives are doubtfully trust worthy; indeed with regard to his Eastern travels some of the episodes were stigmatized as mere inventions by persons who had every reason to be well informed and none to bear false witness. In his histories proper the special motive for embellishment falsification would be too rough a word for the most part disappears, but the habit of inaccuracy remains. Lamartine as an historian belongs exclusively to the rhetorical school as distinguished from the philosophical on the one hand and the documentary on the other. It is not surprising when these characteristics of Lamartine s work are appreciated to find that his fame has declined with singular rapidity in France. As a poet indeed he had lost his reputation many years before he died. He was entirely eclipsed by the brilliant and vigorous school who succeeded him with Victor Hugo at their head. It is possible that the Chute d un Ange was an effort to compete with them on their own ground ; if so, it was an entire failure. Lamartine s power of initiative in poetry was very small, and the range of poetic ground which he could cover strictly limited. He did not attempt the great task of the day, the freeing of the Alexandrine from the restraints imposed upon it, and the devis ing or reviving of new 7 lyric metres to refresh and invigorate French poetic style. He could only carry the picturesque sentimentalism of Rousseau, Bernardin de St Pierre, and Chateaubriand a little further, and clothe it in language and verse a little less antiquated than that of Chenedolle and Millevoye. He has been said to be a French Cowper, and the parallel holds good in respect of versification and of his relative position to the more daringly innovating school that followed, though not in respect of individual peculiarities. Lamartiue in short occupied a kind of half-way house between the 18th century and the Romantic movement, and he never got any further. When a living English critic questioned-his importance in conversation with Sainte-Beuve, the answer was, &quot; He is important to us,&quot; and it was a true answer ; but his importance is now chiefly historical, even to Frenchmen. The already mentioned edition is the most complete one of Lamartine, but there are many issues of his separate works. Since his death, besides the poems already mentioned, some Memoires Inedits of his youth have been published, and also two volumes of correspondence. (G. SA.) LAMB, CHARLES (1775-1834), an original and delight ful English essayist and critic, was born in Crown Office Row, Inner Temple, London, February 10, 1775. His father, John Lamb, a Lincolnshire man, who filled the situation of clerk and servant companion to Mr Salt, one of the benchers of the Inner Temple, was successful in obtaining for Charles, the youngest of three children, a presentation to Christ s Hospital, where the boy remained from his eighth to his fifteenth year (1 782-1789). Here he was fortunate enough to have for a schoolfellow the afterwards famous Samuel Taylor Coleridge, his senior by rather more than two years, and a close and tender life-long friendship began which had a singularly great influence on the whole of his after career. When the time came for leaving school, where he had learned some Greek and acquired considerable facility in Latin composition, Lamb, after a brief stay at home (spent, as his school holidays had often been, over old English authors in the library of Mr Salt), was condemned to the labours of the desk, an &quot; unconquerable impediment &quot; in his speech disqualifying him for a school exhibition, and thus depriving him of the only means by which he could have obtained a university education. For a short time he held a clerkship in the South Sea House undsr his elder brother John, and in 1792 he entered the accountant s office in the East India House, where during the next three and thirty years the hundred folios of what he used to call his true &quot; works &quot; were produced. A dreadful calamity soon came upon him, which seemed to blight all his prospects in the very morning of life, There was insanity in the family, which in his twenty-first year had led to his own confinement for some weeks in a lunatic asylum ; and, a few months afterwards, on the 22d of September 179G, his sister Mary, &quot;worn down to a state of extreme nervous misery by attention to needlework by day and to her mother by night, was suddenly seized with acute mania, in which she stabbed her mother to the heart. The calm self-mastery and loving self-renunciation which Charles Lamb, by constitution excitable, nervous, and timid, displayed at this crisis in his own history and in that of those nearest him, will ever give him an imperishable claim to the reverence and affec tion of all who are capable of appreciating the heroisms of common life. His sister was of course immediately placed in confinement, and with the speedy return of comparative health came the knowledge of her fatal deed ; himself calm and collected, he knew how to speak the words of soothing and comfort. With the help of friends he succeeded in ob taining her release from the life-long restraint to which she would otherwise have been doomed, on the express condition that he himself should undertake the responsibility for her safe keeping. It proved no light charge ; for, though no one was capable of affording a more intelligent or affec tionate companionship than Mary Lamb during her long periods of health, there was ever present the apprehension of the recurrence of her malady ; and, when from time to time the premonitory symptoms had become unmistakable, there was no alternative but her removal, which took place in quietness and tears. How deeply the whole course of Lamb s domestic life must have been affected by his singular loyalty as a brother need not be pointed out ; for one thing, it rendered impossible his union with Alice Winterton, whom he appears to have truly loved, and to whom such touching reference was made long afterwards in Dream Children, a Reverie. Lamb s first appearance as an author was made in the year of the great tragedy of his life (1796), when there were published in the volume of Poems on Various Subjects by Coleridge four sonnets by &quot; Mr Charles Lamb of the India House.&quot; In the following year he also contributed along with Charles Lloyd some pieces in blank verse to Coleridge s new volume of Poems. In 1798 he published a short and pathetic prose tale entitled Rosamund Cray, and in 1799 he was associated with Coleridge and Southey in the publication of tine Annual Anthology, to which he had