"THE PASSIONS OF THE FRENCH ROMANTICS."

Otago Witness, Issue 2934, 8 June 1910, Page 98

"THE PASSIONS OF THE FRENCH ROMANTICS."

LAMARTINE'S FIRST LOVE

Have you ever read that extraordinary work, "The Confession of a Child of the Century," by Alfred de Musset? It is a very wonderful story—founded partially on fact, it is true, the fact being his unhappy adventure with George Sand:; but the fact is only the basis of the story—literature, the imagination of a poet, the illusions of a dreamer form the main material. There is one chapter in the book which rises above the mere personal emotions and impressions which form the chief matter of the story, ind which can never ascape the memory of one who takes a keen interest in French genius and in French character. It is the chapter which describes the state of soul among the young men who were born to the generation that succeeded the glory and the fall of Napoleon. Nothing, as Taine has remarked about Napoleon, proves more conclusively the extraordinary potency of Napoleon's personality than the empire he holds over the generations of men that have succeeded him and known him only by repute. And Alfred de Mueset brings out this fact into great relief by the sense of nothingness, of petty emptiness, of disillusion, which were the characteristics of the young generation of that period. That debauch of glory, of adventure, of brilliant victories in the field, of thrones crumbled and maps turned into waste paper, and, at the centre of it all, this little, pale-faced, terrible man—all these things, especially when the horrors by which they were accomplished were softened by time, were well calculated to make the youth who lived under the obesity of Louis XVIII, the narrowness of Charles X, arid the prosaic comfort of Louis-Phillippe regard themselves as cheated by fortune of a Tich and brilliant heritage. Distance lent enchantment to the. view, and the boys under LouisPhilippe could not see the tragic and youthful dead across the mirage of marshals who had once been smugglers like Massena or stable boys like Murat. The day and the chance of adventure to the adventurous had apparently passed for ever away.

Musset was a child of that generation; and so was Lamartine. Lamartine is a proof of the fact that in the sphere of love, as in so many of the emotions and experiences of mankind, there are two schools of feeling and of temperament. There is in love, aiS in literature, the school of the realists and the school of the romantics. St. Augustine is one of the first great apostles of the school of the romantic lovers; it was he who, describing his first passion, attributed it not so much to the obiect who inspired it as to the love of love —the unconquerable aspiration of the young and the imaginative to find the realisation and embodiment of all the tumultuous dreams of their imagination in some lovely object. The' object may be quite unworthy of the fantastic kingdom in which she moves ; may be of just as little importance as the small match that sets aflame the gigantic magazine of imaginative powder. That does not matter; like St. Augustine, romantics loved because they wanted to love. Such was the character of Lamartine also. His life was a succession for a good part of its duration of passions, strong, tender, and pure; they were the passions of a lover of the Tomantic school. He was born, in the literary sense, partly of the stock of Byron- and partly of that of Rousseau and Chateaubriand l . His work was nearly always inspired by some event in his own life; and a woman was usually the spring that set his being and his pen in motion. I do not put Goethe altogether in the school of romantic lovers; there was a great dash of the realist in. his composition, of which the 60 volumes he produced of poetry, novel, and scientific research and discovery and the 84 robust years through which he lived are some proof. / —A Prudent Mother.— Born in the town of Macon, of parents who were such devoted Royalists that they would not have anything to do with Napoleon even in the greatest hours of his glory, Lamartine could not find the realisation of his dreams in the army; so he found it in a beautiful young lady, whom he was determined, if he could, to marry. But his mother was the usual prudent French matron, and would not hear of a marriage at the age of 20. -That mother, too, gave to her son an idolatry which, in its turn, became in him something like self-idolatry. All his life he took himself seriously; he always wanted to live up to the estimate he formed of himself, which feeling in the individual may lead him to self-conceit, but always has its good side—it restrains, it saves from vulgar tastes, it sometimes even prevents "disaster. "My mother taught me," Lamartine wrote, "never to laugh at myself, but always to remember that I was the handiwork of God." Apart from his brilliant intellectual powers, there was another great factor to keep up the youth's, and also the man's, selfesteem. He was extraordinarily handsome. His beauty is described as "sublime" by Mr Gribble in the brilliant volume he has just produced, "The Passions' of the French Romantics." "Never, I fancy," writes his latest biographer, "was a head more god-like set in the marvellous frame of the valley of Aix, against the deep-blue' background of the Savoy skies" ; and! the portraits warrant this enthusiasm. Moreover, Lamartine wot; full of melancholy and 1 of the desire for love. He had been writing to Virieu of the "vague, sublime, and infinite ideas" which floated l through his mind when he heard the wind sighing through the forest, and he went on: "Ah, yes, if only I could find as. a cure for my

trouble such a woman's face as I used to dream of, I would love her with all the capacity of nr\ heart—as passionately as anv man upon this earth will ever love. My heart leaps in my breast —I feel it and I hear it. God only knows all that it contains and all that it longs for. . . ." This striking young jman was at this epoch, when Mile. P , the young lady for whom he had a certain liking, had to be left, in a rather perilous frame of mind, especially for any woman who was as impressionable as himself and as ingenuous. And this is just what happened when he was sent by his mother on a tour to escape at once from the dangerous seductions of Mile. P -and from the recruiting sergeant of Napoleon. —Graziella.—■ It is not always easy to separate the true and the false in the narrative of a poet, and therefore the real personality of the young girl who a pears as "Graziella" in the well-known work of Lamartine remains a little obscure. But still, even yet there are sufficient traces of her to enable us to reconstruct her person and character: Graziella was the girl's real name. Her family still live near Naples. One of them—a cure —was recently interviewed about her by a contributor to one of the Italian magazines. "Graziella?" he said. "Ah, yes, she was my aunt. Her mother had a lodger—a Frenchman —a M. Lam —Lam—yes, I think it was, as you say, Lamar tine." And Lamartine himself says expressly in his "Memoires" that the story, save for one or two trivial details, was true. He' had gratified his vanity by describing Graziella as a coral-polisher, whereas in point of vulgar fact she was a cigarette maker; but the rest of the narrative was faithful. Graziella was a poor little illiterate workgirl, as will be seen ; but she is a charming creature, and well deserves the lakes of tears that have been given to her story and her memory by the generations that have read her adventure in Lamartine's verses. In her innocent and unschooled way she was as much a romantic lover as this handsome young aristocrat with his dangerous literary genius who had come into her life. But there was a little difference between the so ill-matched pair—that she took the adventure seriously and never could see its transience, while he, with that lesson never to laugh at himself which he had learned from his mother's lips, always had the high sense of his own position and prospects not to hazard the chance of bringing all the romance to an untimely and disturbing end by marriage. But he was, so far as he could be with these thoughts always at the back of his brain, very much in love—if not with Graziella, at least with the love that she embodied and had brought into being. Of which this incident is* a proof: Be had been to see Vesuvius, and Graziella, meanwhile, bad removed with her family from Naples to the little island of Procida. On his return a small boy brought him a letter in badlyspelt Italian, the gist of it being that Graziella feared that she would never see him again. "I went to my room," writes Lamartine, "and threw myself on my bed, and began to weep." But Virieu—Virieu was a somewhat cynical friend —came in, and found him crying, and asked what it was all about, and cheered him with hopeful remarks. Tiens, dit-il, un roman qui commence; il faut le mener a bonne fin! Virieu was a realist in love. There are passages in the story which prove that the illiterate girl had her moments of poetry too—poetry perhaps the more touching because it was so much more real than that of her poet lover. Here is a passage from the book which pictures her in that guise : She sat for hours by the sea, gazing out over the waters, and he [Lamartine] asked her what vision she saw. "I see France," she said, "on the other side of the snow-clad mountain." "And what do you see in France that you find so beautiful?" I asked her. "I see some one who walks," she answered. "He is like you, and he walks, and walks, and walks on a long white road which has no end. He walks straight on, straight on, without ever turning round. I wait for hours and hours, hoping to see him turn and come back. But he does not turn. He still walks on and on." It is quite possible that Graziella never said anything so pretty and so touching, but then one never knows ; women have often a curious genius in describing their emotions. She was less poetical and less her Teal self when she discarded her national costume and put on what she regarded as the latest Paris fashion ; probably it was something a good deal less becoming than the national costume she had treated with contempt. It was probably this Paris dress that helped Lamartine to overcome his passion. And gently he began to break to the poor girl the sombre truth that their adventure was —Only an Adventure, —> that it was a midsummer night's dTeam that vanished with the morning. And then the seriousness of her feeling asserted (itself in contrast with the transience and inner unreality of his. She fled, to the terror of her parents j and Lamartine, following her, with a better knowledge of her nature than her relatives, found her in the little island of Procida, where they had) passed some of their happiest hours. The scene which followed is one of the most delightful in literature-—■ especially in French literature, where love too often is spoken of only from its material side. This is what happened J "Alas I" he says; "it was not yeal love on tniy part, but only the shadow of love. Only I was so young and confiding that I could' not but deceive anyself. I believed that I adored her as

her innocence, her beauty, and her passion merited; and I told her so . . . and she believed me, because she needed the belief that she might live, and because her own soul contained passion enough to compensate for the lack of it in a thousand other hearts." So the night passed, and was consecrated to the "confidences of two lovers who wished that it might last for ever, so that nothing irrelevant might ever come between their lips and hearts." But if it was a night of love, it was also a night of purity and innocence. "Her piety and my shy reserve and the tenderness of our affection for each other protected us from danger. . . . The tender and the voluptuous are as the poles apart, and the abuse of such intimacy would have been an act of profanation." —The Parting.— Graziella was induced to return to her home, and once more the dream began. Lamartine received about that time, when everything pointed to some catastrophe, his friend Virieu again, who came with a special summons to his home from his mother. The lover, afraid of the poignancy of parting; and of the suffering; it was going to inflict, packed without telling anybody, wrote a farewell letter, and prepared to go away in the night; but just as he was about to take his departure Graziella, whom the noise had disturbed, opened her door and came out into the passage: "The full moon was shining on the terrace. The poor child recognised my friend. 'She saw the porter who was shouldering my bag. She reached out her arms to me, and uttered a cry of terror, and then fainted and fell unconscious on the ground." So Graziella was lifted up and carried back to her bed, and Lamartine got into the carriage and drove off. "rolling in the silence of the night along the road to Rome" ; and there is nothing more to be said except that he heard presently that Graziella had died for love of him. "The doctor tells me," she -wrote, 'that 1 shall die in three days' time, but if you were with me I would live. It is the will of God. ... I am bequesting you my hair, which I have had cut off for you." Lamartine had many an hour of selfreproach as he recalled this touching and humble little figure that passed across the radiance of his brilliant personality and famous career. And now and then there breaks forth a note of something like remorse, as thus: "Poor Graziella. Since those days many days have passed. I have loved, and I have been loved, again. Other rays of beauty and tenderness have illuminated my sqmbre path through life. Other souls have been opened to me, and have revealed in the hearts of women the mysterious treasures of beauty, holiness, and puritv which God has placed on earth in order to make us understand, foresee? and long for heaven. But nothing has tarnished your first appeaTance in my heart. . . . There remains in the depths of my heart a tear, which oozes, drop by drop, and falls secretly on your memory, refreshing and embalming it in my mind."

The true moral of the story is that philandering is a dangerous game at which to play, but the woman usually has to pay. the stakes.—T.P.'s Weekly.