Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 129.djvu/17

Rh than patriotic ardour the one beloved local corner which bears to themselves the aspect of paradise on earth!

Lamartine was very vain and very apt to magnify everything'connected with himself, but we doubt much whether any English writer would have had the courage to describe with equal frankness the circumstances and scenes of his childhood. The great bare salon of Milly, with an alcove at the end containing the bed of the mother and the cradles of the babies; the walls roughly plastered, with here and there a break through which the naked stone was visible; the tiles of the floor cracked in a thousand pieces by the feet of the dancers who, under the Revolution, used the room as a public ball-room; the raftered roof all blackened with smoke; the little garden where squares of vegetables were relieved only by lines of strawberries and pinks,—all these are set before us in the homeliest detail. Nor does the poet hesitate to sketch himself, sallying forth to the mountains in charge of the goats along with the other village boys, just such a little figure as Edouard Frere delights to paint—barefoot, bareheaded, in little coat of coarse blue cloth, with a wallet across his shoulder containing his homely dinner, "un gros morcean de pain noir meli de seigle, un fromage de chlvre, gros et dur comme un caillou" Nothing could be more charming than his description of the little goat-herd's day among the mountains, which is full of all those lights and shadows of sentiment, those aerial graces of mist and distance, with which his diffuse poetical narrative is always laden, yet never loses its connection with the central figure, the barefooted boy among his village comrades—patricianborn if almost peasant-bred, with the faroff fragrance of a splendid court hanging about the room to which he returns of nights, though the plaster is here and there broken on the walls, and the cracked tiles are innocent of any carpet. This mixture of poetic grace and romance with many sordid surroundings, the junction of high breeding and ancient race, and that delicate sense of noblesse which often gives so much charm to the character, with absolute poverty and privation, endured with smiling content, and even enjoyed, is always delightful to the sympathetic looker-on.

The reader who has followed Lamartine through the "Confidences" and "Nouvelles Confidences" out of which, unfortunately, he was always attempting to make more books and mote money, may perhaps tire of the often-repeated description, the details so often begun da capo, the minute but always most loving touches by which he renews the portraiture of his home. For ourselves, we avow we can swallow a great deal of this without murmur or objection; and we could Scarcely suggest a more perfect if tranquil* pleasure to those unacquainted with or forgetful of Lamartine's history, than may be found in the handsome and not too long volume—a mere piece of bookmaking, the harsh critic may say, the old recollections served up again—which, under the title of " Mimoires InSdites" has been published since his death;—or the companion book which he called "Le Manuscrit de ma Mère" and himself published not long before the end of his life. The critic and the social philosopher may judge hardly such revelations to the public of the secrets of family life, but we doubt whether the profanation is ii} any way sufficient to counterbalance the advantages of so true and close and intimate a history. Whatever degree of genius may be allowed to him in his own field of poetry, no admirer will ever claim for Lamartine the glory of dramatic power. He is religious, descriptive, sentimental, tender, with a fine if vague sense of natural beauty; but he is never in the smallest degree dramatic. What nature, however, has not given him, memory and love have almost supplied; and the picture of Milly, and of the beautiful and tender woman who forms its centre, is such as few poets have been able to invent for us. We speak sometimes with a suppressed sneer of the Frenchman's ideal, the ma 7nere of a sentiment which it is so easy to stigmatize as sentimentality. But such a figure as that of Madame de Lamartine, as exhibited to us in her own journal, as well as through her son's half-adoring sketches, is one which no lover of humanity would be content to let go. Simple but thoughtful—not intellectual, as we use the word; full of prejudices, no doubt—the prejudices of rank, though her actual position was scarcely above that of a farmer's homely wife; beautiful in thought and feeling as well as in person—always refined, yet always natural,—it is more easy to fall into panegyric of such a woman than to judge her coldly. In every scene of her life she is set before us with a tender fulness of detail. We see her thanking God with overflowing heart for the unhoped-for happiness which she enjoys in her rude and poor home, with no society but that of the peasants of the village—she, a great lady,