Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 129.djvu/22

14 extraordinary facility of youth which is set upon one thing to-day, and to-morrow has forgotten its very existence. If we may judge of "Saul" from the "Fragment Bibliqite? which we find in Lamartine's later volumes, it will be difficult to believe in Talma's admiration. This, as far as we can judge, was the only time that he attempted the drama. Even earlier, however, than "Saul," the incident which forms the groundwork of the tales of " Graziella" and "Raphael" had occurred in the young poet's own life; and nothing could have served the occasion better, or called forth his genius so well as the romance which no natural modesty prompted him to keep secret, in all its delightful mixture of reality and fiction—the "Dichtung und Wahrheit" of which a greater poet and mightier genius did not disdain the charm.

It is only just to Lamartine, however, to say that his graceful but languishing and sentimental tales are more prepossessing to the reader, and call forth in a much lesser degree the natural opposition which is roused in everybody's mind by highly-pitched egotism and vanity, than those of Goethe. "Graziella," in particular, is a beautiful little idyl, perfectly pure, picturesque, and touching. The Italian girl herself has something of the charm which we have already remarked in Lamartine's early sketches of his own childhood. She is represented in all the homely circumstances of her lot, without any attempt to make an impossible young lady out of the humble Procitana. This error, which is one into which English romancers continually fall, does not seem to affect the Frenchman, though whether this may be a consequence of the democratical atmosphere of his nation, or arises merely from his higher artistic susceptibility, it is difficult to tell. Whatever the cause may be, however, Graziella is as complete a fisher-girl as the little Lamartine was a goat-herd among his native hills. Neither her costume nor her habits of life are sacrificed to the elevation and refinement necessary to a heroine. To be sure^the costume of a fisher-lass from Procida is less objectionable in romance than the homely gown of an English country girl; but the plot ventures almost to the edge of ridicule when he represents his Graziella trying on the costume of civilization, and pinching her larger beauty into the French corsets and silk gown, which in her ignorance she thought likely to please him. Altogether this poetic little tale is, we think, the finest thing Lamartine has done. It is a portion of his "Confidences" he is the hero, the god of the little southern world, into which he threw himself with all the enthusiasm of youth. Of all his landscapes, except the home scenery of Milly, ther^ is none of which he has so taken* in the^peculiar and pervading charm. The sunny yet dangerous sea, the lovely isles, the hill-terraces, with their wonderful Elysian points of vision, the subtle sweetness of the air, the mingling of sky and water, with all their ineffable tones of light and colour, have been nowhere more perfectly represented; and if the passion and despair of the young Neapolitan may be excessive, they are made possible by her country, by the softening effects of that seductive air, and by the extreme youth of the heroine. Very different is the sickly and unnatural effect of the companion story "Raphael," the scene of which is laid in the town, and on the lake, of Aix in Savoy, and in which the sentimental passion of the two lovers becomes nauseous to the reader in its very commencement, and is infinitely more objectionable in its ostentatious purity than any ordinary tale of passion. The hero of " Graziella " is young and guileless, half unaware of, and more than half partaking the innocent frenzy he awakens; but Raphael is a miserable poor creature, good for nothing but to lie at his mistress's feet, to listen to her movements through the door that divides them, to rave about her perfections and his love. The sickly caresses—the long, silent raptures in which the two gaze into each other's eyes—the still more sickly ravings of their love, which has no pleasant beginning, no dramatic working up to^ wards a climax, but jumps into languishing completeness at once,— all breathe an unhealthy, artificial, enervating atmosphere, pernicious to the last degree for any young mind which could be charmed by it, and not far from disgusting to the maturer reader. In both these productions, the poet, as we have said, is his own hero. The incidents are professedly true; and the author gives himself credit throughout his autobiographical works for having passed through all the tumults and agitations of these exhibitions of wouldbe passion. We say would-be, for there is not in reality any passion in them. Nothing of the fiery directness of overwhelming emotion is in either narrative. "Raphael," in particular, is slowly piled up with a leisurely gloating over the mental fondnesses and fine sentiments of the languishing pair, which stops all feeling