Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 129.djvu/23

Rh of indulgence; and when the sentimental lover, wrapped up in thoughts of his Julia, accepts from his mother the price of her trees, and hurries away, under pretence of sickness, to Aix, to indulge his maudlin passion by another meeting, the reader loses all patience with so miserable a hero. But to the poet it seems quite reasonable and natural, not to say angelic, of the mother to make any sacrifice to satisfy the necessities of her son's heart, and quite consistent with the son's honour and poetic nobility of soul to leave all the duties of life behind him, and moon his life away dancing attendance^ upon his sickly love, " collant ses levres a ses beaux pieds? and raving and being raved at with weak and wordy adoration.

In the other narratives of the "Confidences" such, for instance, as the tale called "Fior d'Aliza," the poet is not the hero but the sympathizing friend of the chief sufferers, with some gain in point of modesty, but not much in point of art All for love, in a sense which goes altogether beyond our robuster meaning, is his perpetual motto. The world appears to him only as a place in which two young persons may bill and coo, turning all its beautiful and noble scenery into a succession of nests for the inevitable turtledoves. In all this, let us do him justice, there is nothing licentious or immoral. When there may happen to occur a love which cannot end in marriage, it is almost ostentatiously demonstrated to be a union of the heart only; and it is on the whole a pure idyl which Lamartine loves. The most that can be said of him is, that he indulges freely in the amiable indecency, chiefly concerned with babies and their mothers, which Continental manners permit and authorize. He is fond of nursery exhibitions, of sucklings and their play; but only the prudish English taste perhaps will object to this, such improprieties being considered in other regions virtuous, nay, religious. This defect and an undue exhibition of the delights of wedded and lawful love, are almost all the moral sins of which we can accuse him; and there are even among ourselves, no doubt, a host of virtuous critics to whom the fact of wedlock makes everything correct and legitimate. This is not the kind of weakness, however, which we naturally expect from a Frenchman.

The kindred works written in verse instead of in poetical prose, which are of congenial character to the tales of the "Confidences" cannot be said to add much to Lamartine's reputation. The story of "Jocelyn? the best known of these larger works, is one prolonged meditation interspersed with a few incidents, rather than a dramatic poem, though the tale it tells has chances strange enough to bring out character, had the vague young hero possessed ai$r. The story is supposed to be taken from a manuscript found in the house of a village cure after his death, and was in reality, we are informed, an account of the actual adventures of a parish priest well known to the poet. The habit of founding works of art upon incidents of real life is an almost infallible sign of a second-rate genius, though it is an expedient which all the world loves to attribute to every imaginative writer. Following this very commonplace suggestion, Lamartine constantly takes credit to himself for being merely the narrator of actual events, with what truth we are unable to decide. The very name of the cure thus plucked out of his privacy and made into a poem is, we think, indicated in the "Confidences. 7 ' Such an effort, however, to make fact stand in the place of art, is seldom successful; and that man would be wise indeed who could discern any individual features in the colourless apparition of Jocelyn. He is a type of generosity, love, self-sacrifice, and impressionable feeling, but not in the smallest degree a recognizable man. The poet, in a, postscriptum which now prefaces the work, denies the imputation of having intended to write "a plea against the celibacy of the clergy, an attack upon religion." The idea of making, as he says, "of a poem a controversy in verse, for or against any question of discipline," had, he declares, never entered his head; though it cannot be denied that the accusation seems justified, at least by the character of the tale. The young Jocelyn, overhearing the lamentations of his mother—such lamentations as no doubt Lamartine heard not unf requently at home—over the defective dot which kept her daughter from marrying, makes an instant sacrifice of his own dawning youth and aspirations, and dedicates himself to the priesthood in order thus to endow his sister with the entire possessions of the family. No idea that this was anything but a perfectly noble and manly act crosses the .mind of either poet or hero. We then follow him to the seminary, where, with much painful repression of his feelings, he goes through his preliminary studies. These, however, are interrupted by the Revolution; his home is broken up, and he himself, hunted