Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 129.djvu/19

Rh the consent of the parents on both sides to his marriage on the other, the young poet had his cares and troubles, and suffered much from the doubt, the suspense,, and the vague unhappiness which they bring. He kept himself alive and moderately cheerful, however, by " Meditations^ which passed from one hand to another; and while read by the young men of the day in studios and barracks, and by ladies in many a dainty boudoir, prepared for him a certain melancholy but elevated reputation, for the moment among private friends only, but ready to burst forth in all the explosive enthusiasm of youth, so soon as these delicate and visionary strophes should be given to the world. It is scarcely possible to overestimate the importance of this mode of preparing the public mind for a new fame. We have in our own time seen instances in which it has triumphed over many disadvantages, and secured a most superior and inteltectual audience, proud of their own discovery of a man of genius before he manifested himself to the world.

At last fortune favoured the poet, raining all her gifts upon him at once. In the year 1820, when he was nearly thirty, after years of suspense, his friends at Paris procured for him an appointment as secretary to the French embassy at Naples, and at the same moment the obstacles in the way of his marriage were happily overcome, and he left France in haste for his new duties, carrying with him his bride. At precisely the same time, the day before his departure, his first volume of "Meditations" saw the light. All the things he had desired were thus showered upon him at once. So far as our purpose is concerned, the publication of his first volume was the most momentous of these three incidents. His diplomatic career lasted only until 1830, and was not of profound importance in his history; and his marriage, though apparently happy and prosperous, calls for no particular notice here; but his poems made the young man, about whom many people were already interested and curious, at once into a notability, and gained him a place in the heart of his nation, then in all the fervour of a new tide of intellectual life. The empire, with all its victories, following close upon the Revolution with all its terrors, had not only diverted the mind, and for the moment arrested the literature of France, but had given that much-tried country so much to do, so many excitements of a more violent kind, that poetry had found little possibility of a quiet hearing. Such few voices as had pressed through the tumult were not of a kind to make a very profound impression, and they were chiefly listened to at all as expressing the sentiment of the moment. The prison songs of Andr£ Ch&iier, the emigrant's song of Chllteaubriand, bring before us*rather a painful sense 01 the circumstances that inspired them than any thrill of poetical enthusiasm; and the one wild utterance of the Revolution age, the fiery strain composed on one fierce note, of Rouget de PIsle, is still more emphatically the creation, as it became the inspiration, of passionate popular feeling—a war-cry rather than a poem. The Bourbons, however unwelcome their reign or unsatisfactory their principles in a political point of view, did France the good service of bringing back the ordinary after the fiery and long-continued reign of the extraordinary. The natural conditions of life returned, bringing with them the intellectual energy and literary art for which France has always been distinguished. The reader is aware how great an outburst of new life in this channel distinguished the first half of this century. The revival affected not only the producers of literature but its audience. Not only was the voice emancipated and the pen, but the ear of the listener, so long deafened with echoes of battle, grew eager for the softer sounds, the more attractive harmonies, the varied and human voices of peace.

And perhaps the very extravagance and violence of the past age gave a deeper charm to the sentimental sweetness, the tranquil tone of feeling, the woods and hills and valleys, the mists and aerial perspectives of poetry such as Lamartine's. In the reaction from a violently practical influence such as forces the mind to deal with things rather than thoughts, sentiment has perhaps its best opportunity, just as the retired warrior becomes the gentlest of neighbours, the most placid and patient of cultivators, replacing campaigns by cabbages, after the model of Cincinnatus, with an ease and content which is much less easy to attain to after the excitement, the wear and tear of other professions. France, accordingly, always accessible on that side of her mind, so to speak, and weary of excitement, took hold with genuine affection and interest of the young Burgundian. That was one of the moments, so often recurring, when all the world was young, and when the entire generation awoke to a sense of its intellectual privileges and superiority as one man, feeling within itself the power to do