Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 129.djvu/16

 8 A CENTURY 01-‘ GREAT POETS.

sister; perhaps it was the only way in which the pure romances of honest love could have had any existence in the case of a youth and maiden of rank in the France of that day; and here, accordingly, he found his bride. The little romance is charming; but scarcely less interesting is the arrested love-story of the heir. Long after, when M. le Chevalier was the only one married of his family, and the broth- ers and sisters had all grown old, the bride whom he found in the Chapter of Salles, makes a note in her diary descriptive of the head of the house, the elder brother, whose determination not to marry had made her own marriage possible.

M. de Lamartine, who was intended before the Revolution to be the sole possessor of all the great wealth of the (amily. loved Made- moiselle de Saint-Huruge, who was not consid- ered sufficiently rich for him. He preferred to remain a bachelor rather than to have the vexation of marrying another. Mademoiselle dc Saint-Huruge is too old now to think of marriage. . . . She is good, gentle, pious, in- teresting, I-Ier features show traces of past beauty. attractive but obscured by sadness. My hrother~in-law and she meet eve even- ing at Macon in the ralon of the family, and appear to retain a pure and constant friend- ship for each other.

How quaint, how touching is this little picture? The great old room half lighted with blazing logs in the great chimney, faded tapestry, faded gilding, beautiful old politeness and manners that do not fade — and the old lovers, for each other‘s sake unmarried throu h half a centu, meeting every evening, with who can tel what ex- quisite old sentiment, gossamer link of tenderness unex ressed between them! The society whic made such a state of affairs possible, and the curious subjec- tion of soul to the rules of that society, which made even a wealthy heir helpless under the decision of his family is appa.U- ing to contemplate; but we do not know if the picture of an old man and wife snug and comfortable, would ever charm us as does this strange little vignette, so full of delicate suggestiveness. Anyhow, it is clear the second sons and daughters of French noble families, the chevaliers and c/zrznoirzexrzx of a former day, have little right to grumble at the Revolution.

There is nothing more attractive in all that Lamartine has left behind him titan this record of the ancient world as it ap- peared acmss his own cradle. In no way could the curious difference between the old time and the new appear more dis- tinctly. The poet makes himself a link

between the generations by this perha too often repeated but always delight ul story. His many autobiographical se - revelations— revelations which became not only tiresome but pitiful when they treated of the man in the midst of his career and afforded a medium for the pouring forth of much egotism and vanity —do not affect us at all in the same way when they concern the parents, the uncles and aunts, who formed a kind of family council over all the acts of the one male descendant who was to be their heir. The after-life of the poet contains noth- ing half so touching or so charmin as those pictures of his early days whicg he delighted to make, and in which he is always so happy. We know no poetical biography more perfect than the chapters which describe his childhood at Milly, the little dreary French country-house, where the family established themselves after the terrors of the Revolution were over. This little tzrre, scarcely sulﬁcient to main- tain his family upon, was all that the proud and chivalrous Chevalier would ao- cept—the portion given to him on his marriage, according to old rule, instead of the equal share to which he had a right accordin to the new law. This some- what quixotic sense of honour, which ms not shared by the other members of the family, was, one feels, somewhat hard upon his wife and children, who were thus ex- posed to the continual interference of his unmarried brothers and sisters, who were much richer than they, and fully disposed to exercise all their powers of animadver- sion, in self-repayment of the help they sometimes gave. Lamartine is never tired of describin Milly, the home of his outh and of his ieart; and never was ome painted with a more charming mixture of grace, and sentiment, and perfect homeli- ness. Happy above the lot of man has been that English Philistine, who first charmed the world by the profound re- mark that the French were so destitute of all home feeling as not even to possess in their language zt word which expressed what we (superior beings as we are) meant by home. How often and with what wearisome repetition has this curious fal- lacy gone from mouth to mouth, in the_ face of a nation which never travels, never.» moves from its fayer, its daclter "ts 5/123 sai, when it can help it—-whose peasants cling like limpets to their native soil— whose romancists are never tired of the cottage interior, the 1/iewr mrzrmir rillaﬁrl »-and whose writers generally never lose an opportunity to commend with more