Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 129.djvu/24

16 to the hills, finds refuge in a cavern from the pursuit of his enemies. Here he ministers to another less happy refugee, who dies in his arms, leaving to his charge a stripling called the son, but in reality the daughter of the dead man, Laurence, who succeeds for a long time in deceiving her sole protector in respect to her sex. From the moment of her appearance thus, his cave becomes dear and beautiful to the young student, who, without knowing why, is immediately transported into the mysterious happiness of a first love. After he discovers her secret, the young man realizes the meaning of this new world in which he feels himself to be living, and for two years the lovers live an idyllic life of purity yet mutual fondness, adoring each other with all the frankness of youth, yet living like a pair of angels in their cave. This happiness is interrupted by a sudden appeal from the peasant who has all along protected Jocelyn, calling him to visit in prison a banished bishop on the very eve of the guillotine. Tearing himself from the side of his love at the bidding of duty, the young man goes reluctantly down the mountain-side to the prison at Grenoble to visit his bishop. Here, however, he meets with a trial so immense that flesh and blood is incapable of supporting it. The bishop, dying, insists on making the unhappy neophyte a priest, in order that he himself may be enabled to confess and to leave the world with all the sacraments of the Church. Jocelyn, remembering his love, resists. He does all that he can to escape from this terrible dilemma, but in vain; and at last finds himself with despair receiving the undesired consecration, which makes Laurence henceforth impossible to him. The tremendous interview they have at the top of their hill and on the threshold of their cave before they part forever, is the climax of the story. Jocelyn returns in moody anguish to his seminary. No consciousness of having done well, no hope of reconciling himself to the dreary future, supports him. In losing Laurence he loses everything. The next and only remaining change in his life is his transfer from the seminary to the mountain parish of Valneige, where he spends the rest of his days in the depths of poverty, goodness, and self-absorption. Here, as in the first awakening of his unsuspected love for Laurence, which he supposes to be affectionate friendship for a boy confided to his care, there are charming touches of natural feeling, and of that rural life which is the truest thing in Lamartine's experience. But neither the occupations of his profession and the interests of the little rural community round him, nor the calming influences of time, do anything for Jocelyn; and his melancholy existence culminates when he is hastily sent for to see a dying traveller in a neighboring village, and there finds his lost love, whose confession he receives, and to whom he administers the last sacraments. When he has buried Laurence, he has no more to do in life, and dies in his humble presbytère, leaving behind him the sentimental record long drawn out of balked love, and wasted life, and melancholy beyond all hope.

Such is the story, weak, sweet, maudlin, and superhuman. It caught the public attention forcibly, we are told, at the moment of its production, and has attained a more or less secure place among French classics. Jocelyn' is the one of my works," Lamartine himself tells us, "which has procured for me the most intimate and numerous communications with unknown persons of all ages and countries." Notwithstanding, however, this popular testimony, it is almost impossible to imagine anything more hectic and unnatural, more opposed to the conditions of practicable existence, than this long monologue, this song; upon one note. There have been poetical heroes before now to whom love has been the one thing worth living for; and, indeed, a visionary passion balked of all fulfilment has taken a larger place in poetry than perhaps any other manifestation of human feeling. It is the very soul, for instance, of the noble poetry of Italy; but we need not say how different is the poor and false ideal afforded us in "Jocelyn" from anything that could be suggested even by the shadow of that high and inspiring passion. Lamartine's hero is as incapable of thinking of anything else, or of rising above his immediate personal recollections and hankerings for the thing forbidden, as he is of resisting the pressure of circumstances which steal his happiness from him. He has neither manhood enough to face the raving and cursing ecclesiastic in his prison and preserve his liberty, nor, when that liberty is gone, to accept the consequences. Neither the strength to hold fast, nor the strength to v give up, is in him. Such a frail and weak character is a favourite of fiction, where all its vacillations do excellent service in bringing out the varying shades of human weakness; but this does not seem to have been in the slightest degree Lamartine's, intention. On the contrary, it is an ideal