Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 129.djvu/21

Rh an obscured divinity of origin which interferes with the content and comfort of the race more, perhaps, than they heighten its enjoyments. The " thoughts which lie too deep for tears " of Wordsworth, are too profound, too broad for the musing melancholy which invades so many gentle souls in times of loneliness—in those moments when there is nothing positive to complain of, but life runs low, and everything is obscured with veils and mists of melancholy. To such a mood the poetic strain which breathes softly but sadly the universal despondencies of earth—generalizing its less weighty miseries into one vague plaint, sweet and always soft like the waves on the beach when the sea is calm, and only a reminiscence of past storm is- in the measured break and ripple — is beyond description welcome. The surcharged heart, heavy with it knows not what, finds relief. It finds brotherhood, sympathy, comprehension—it even feels in its own languors, its own gentle discontent, a trace of something sublime—a superiority to the common mass which is, in itself, infinitely consoling. We have but little poetry in England which takes the same place with the same dignity. "Pleasures of Memory," and "Pleasures of Hope," and "Pleasures of Imagination," have all dropped out of recollection, though possibly in their day they filled this place, and supplied this perennial want of the mind. But Lamartine does it with more variety, with more dignity, and absolute certainty that this is the true use of poetry. And so far he is right. It is, if not its single and absolute end, at least one of its most serviceable uses. And the audience to which such a poet appeals is more numerous and perhaps more important than any other. He misses the highest and the lowest, whose tastes curiously enough often agree—the lower level requiring for excitement those lofty and primitive passions which the highest finds its enjoyment in, because they are the highest impulses of which humanity is capable. But all the vast mass of the middle, the centre of humanity, the hearts that feel without having any necessity to penetrate to the depths of feeling; the minds which think without being impelled much beyond the surface; the gentle and sensible (to use that word in its French, not its English, meaning) intelligences, which are open to all poetic influences not too high for them—taking the highest indeed on trust, because they are told to do so, but finding a real and refined enjoyment in the poetry of reflection and sentiment which is in within their personal grasp,—is his natural kingdom. This is the world which Lamartine addressed, and where he was received with cordial yet tearful acclamations; he was "le po'ete de Vame" Could there be for his audience any description more pouching, or more adapted to penetrate directly to the heart? That Talleyrand should be the author of this title is one of the quaintest of circumstances. The reader might perhaps be tempted to ask whether he had a soul at all, that cleverest of all possible diplomatists. But Lamartine does not seem to have been troubled by any such doubt; indeed it is wonderful to see with what ease the mind accepts the oracular sentence of a man who acknowledges its own excellences, and predicts* its success, "Call me wise, and I will allow you to be a judge" (of wisdom), says a clever Scotch proverb. The poet, in this instance, seems to have been moved by a very natural feeling to the point of describing his first great applauder as an "oracle." In all these volumes, however, full as they are of the personality of the writer, and of his private recollections and moods of mind, there is no attempt to embody in any living type of character his theories of existence, or such counsel as he had to bestow upon his poetical audie'nee. So far as he had a hero at all, Lamartine was his own hero. The dramatic faculty is almost altogether wanting in him. Before the period of his first volume, he had attempted a Biblical drama, bearing the title of "Saul," a fragment of which was afterwards published; and so far had he gone in this undertaking that he read the drama to the great actor Talma, hoping no less for it than admission to the classic stage of the Frangais. " Talma was full of enthusiasm for the poetry, the style, and the fine effects which result from the conception of the piece," he writes. "As I went on he twisted himself about in his easychair, and said, 'There is tragedy in this. It is astonishing. I should never have believed it!' He told me—and, better still, he allowed me to see—that the part of Saul tempted him greatly. He repeated to me a score of times that no lines so fine had ever been read to him; that I was a poet, and perhaps the only one existing; that the 4 Moise* of M. de Chateaubriand was fine, but that mine transcended it." This was very fine talk; but it did not open the difficult doors of the Frangais; and the young artist seems to have succumbed at once, and to have thought nothing more about it, with that