Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 129.djvu/25

Rh figure which he means to set before us, a being superior to the common rules of humanity, a saint and martyr, the very emblem and impersonation of poetical self-sacrifice. We cannot find a line to show that the poet himself felt anything to be wanting in the type he chooses of perfect love and suffering; and though the reader is more impatient than sympathetic, the writer has always the air of being perfectly satisfied with his own creation, and convinced that he has set forth in it a high and most attractive ideal Laurence is still more shadowy than her priest-lover; and but for the intense happiness which we are told she is capable of conferring by her presence, her looks, and her caresses, is the mere symbol of a woman without any character at all. In short, the reader feels that this ideal pair are very badly used by their Maker, who makes them suffer an infinity of vague torture without any compensation for it, any sense of duty to support them, any nobility of resignation to reconcile their lives to ordinary existence. What is called self-renunciation thus becomes a mere forced and involuntary endurance, against which they struggle all their lives: while the happiness to which they aspire is degraded into a monotonous rapture of touch and clasp and caress; not passion, but maudlin fondness; not despair, but maudlin lamentations over what they would but cannot possess.

The second poem which the author, with some vague plan in his head, of which he does not reveal the fin mot, meant to form part of a series of which "Jocelyn" was the first—also finds its centre of interest in the same blazing, hot love which is the only power worth noticing in the universe, according to Lamartine. We do not pretend to say what the connection between the two may be. At first glance we might suppose that one of them represents that "love which never had an earthly close," which is always so captivating to the imagination—and the other, love satisfied and triumphant forcing its way through all obstacles. This transparent contrast and connection, however, is destroyed by the fact that the "Chute d'un Ange" closes in still more dismal despair and misery than anything that happens to Jocelyn; and that the muddle of torture, like the muddle of bliss, comes about apparently without any moral cause whatever, from circumstances over which neither the poet nor his hero has any control. What moral meaning there is in it, or rather is intended to be in it, is beyond our power to discover. It is a puzzle upon which the ingenuity of some critic at leisure might occupy itself, were the question worth the trouble. The story is, however, solemnly introduced to us as coming from the lips of a prophet-hermit of Lebanon, who dies as soon as he has accomplished the recital. The angel whose fall is the subject of the tale belongs to those primitive times when the sons of God made alliances with the daughters of men, at the curious cost, according to Lamartine, of living nine lives (an unlucky number) upon earth before they could once more attain their native heaven. The treatment of the fallen angel is original at least, if nothing more. When he drops suddenly into manhood, moved by the hot and generous purpose of saving his human love (who knows nothing of him) from the hands of giants, he brings with him no reminiscences of his better state, no traditions of heaven or heavenly knowledge, but becomes a salvage man, without even the power of speech, knowing nothing about himself, and unable to communicate with the primitive people about him. This transformation is so complete, that even when taught by Daïdha, the object of his affections, to speak, and raised by his love for her to a certain humanity, no sort of recollection ever seems to come back to him; and the only purpose for which he is brought upon this earth seems again to be mere billing and cooing, accomplished under the most tragic risks, and with hideous interruptions of suffering, over which the couple, increased by the addition of twin babies of portentous appetite, have many extraordinary triumphs, emerging again constantly on the other side of the cloud into a sickly paradise of embraces, sucklings, and such-like conjugal and nursery blisses. What is meant by the very earthly Olympus of primeval giant gods into which they are carried, or by the final mysterious conclusion in the desert, when Daïdha dies cursing, for the death of her children, the husband who has resigned heaven for her, we are unable to tell; neither can we feel that this climax demonstrates the emptiness of human good as shown in the desolate ending as much of the happy and fortunate as of the disappointed lover, though probably this is what the poet meant. The angel-father breaks into blasphemy when he sees his edifice of happiness fall to pieces around him, and makes a last pyrotechnic effort to consume himself along with his dead wife and children; but even when he comes to this conclusion, nothing beyond LIVING AGE.