SOURCE: "Poetry," in The French Romantics, Vol. 1, edited by D. G. Charlton, Cambridge University Press, 1984, pp. 113-62.

[In this excerpt, Ireson assesses Lamartine's contribution to French Romanticism.]

Two dates effectively mark the period of the Romantic movement in French poetry. These are 1820, which saw the publication of Lamartine's Méditations poétiques, and 1840, which marks a point of termination and a clear divide in the poetry of the nineteenth century. Within these two decades, the values and procedures of French poetry were revolutionised….

Lamartine was the first poet to break through into the new period. The twenty-four poems of the original edition of his Méditations poétiques mark a departure from previous poetry, not in the form or language, for both of these clearly follow the models presented by the eighteenth century, but in the range and treatment of themes and in the sensibility which they express. With two exceptions ('Chants lyriques de Saul' and 'La Poésie sacrée'), which are adaptations into French verse of lyrical passages from the Old Testament, the themes are contemporary and are brought into a sharp focus by being apparently related to the direct experience of the poet himself, experience which is, however, held within an ambivalent perspective, so that it is not clear whether imagination or memory is at work. Revelations by Lamartine himself, in the form of commentaries published with the 1849 edition (which includes the subsequent volume, Nouvelles Méditations poétiques), throw a discreet light on the circumstances which gave rise to individual poems, but are subject to caution in many cases over precise questions of fact. Popular imagination has fastened on a few poems where elevated passion and grief at separation or bereavement are expressed lyrically against allusions to events personally experienced ('Invocation', 'L'Isolement', 'Le Lac', etc.), and biographical details have been made to obtrude upon the text. The main facts concerned refer to the liaison between Lamartine and Julie Charles, the wife of the President of the Académie des Sciences. Meeting at Aix-les-Bains in Savoy, a little more than a year before her death, the two lived out an idyll which passed rapidly from sensual love to a deep, spiritualised passion, thwarted by convention and separation. 'Ma vie est liée à celle d'une femme que je crois mourante!' wrote Lamartine to his friend de Virieu on 16 December 1816, and Mme Charles was indeed moving into the terminal stages of tuberculosis. News of her death in Paris, following a year of frequent meetings while the illness visibly grew upon her, reached Lamartine at his family's house in Mâcon in late December 1817. This event, the first major crisis in his life, marked a rapid change in his poetry, deepening and widening the range, linked, as it immediately became, with the problem of religious faith and doubt.

It also intensified the special quality of his verse, the sense of immediacy with which he appeared able to communicate with his reader through the formality of the verse instrument which he used. Looking back in 1849, in the first detailed preface which he added to his Méditations, he wrote: 'Je suis le premier qui ait fait descendre la poésie du Parnasse et qui ait donné à ce qu'on nommait la muse, au lieu d'une lyre à sept cordes de convention, les fibres mêmes du coeur de l'homme, touchées et émues par les innombrables frissons de l'âme et de la nature.' This quest for a new power of directness in poetic language will be at the centre of most developments in French poetry in the nineteenth century. Lamartine's formulation is significant. It shows the extent to which he himself is constrained to work within the limits of the old conventions and style; and it also shows his personal sense of the transposition achieved through poetry: a resonance set up by inward and outward events and seeking its equivalents in language. He notes, in the same preface, the two main ways in which poetic language makes its impact: through images and through verbal harmony, leaving aside the ratiocinative function, perhaps as an unwanted legacy from the previous century. The image he sees as deriving from imagination, and imagination as inseparable from memory ('l' imagination, c'est-à-dire la mémoire qui revoit et qui repeint en nous'). The recalled image arouses associated feelings, and the play of such images enlivens the field of ideas set up by the poem. The primary quality of poetry appears, however, to have been, for Lamartine, its verbal harmony, a pre-cognitive feature which he himself exploits with great facility.

This facility, which becomes a fault in the later poetry, is not too readily apparent in the Méditations poétiques of 1820. Lamartine claims (also in his preface of 1849) that these first published poems were the result of several years of preparation. The earliest go back to about 1814 ('A Elvire', 'Le Golfe de Baya'). The lyrical extracts from Saül recall the relative success, through readings in the salons, of a tragedy turned down by Talma in 1817. In his search for a form and style adapted to his needs (what he calls 'la voix'), he was particularly affected by the writings attributed to Ossian (read, presumably in Letourneur's translation of 1777, or Baour-Lormian's of 1801), and ascribed some of the melancholy of his descriptions of natural scenes to the example of the Gaelic bard. But, in the first instance, he turned his hand to the composition of elegies in the manner of Bertin (Les Amours, 1780) and Parny (Poésies érotiques, n.d.; in Euvres complètes, 1808), who wrote short, amatory pieces, without the necessary inclusion of the theme of grief or melancholy. Millevoye (Élégies, 1814) had recently provided examples of the latter kind. Out of these exercises Lamartine developed his own form of lyrical poem. He acquired, probably from Parny, the technique of increasing the impact of a poem by bringing together two opposed themes within a single piece in order to produce a heightened emotional intensity and, by an original handling of the internal structure of the poem, created the characteristic tone and movement of the méditation poétique, which was virtually a new form of the lyric in France. The external forms of the poem have not changed. Lamartine uses short sequences of quatrains to form what are recognisably elegies ('L'Automne', 'Le Vallon', 'L'Isolement'). He constructs odes in the ten-line and six-line stanzas used by J.-B. Rousseau ('Le Génie', 'L'Enthousiasme', 'Le Désespoir'), an epistle to Byron ('L'Homme') and a discours en vers ('Dieu') in the traditional alexandrine. 'Le Lac' was originally titled 'Ode au lac du Bourget', and is in fact an ode to time, apostrophising the lake and the landscape around it, while other formal devices, such as the rhetorical recall of an episode, antiphone, syntactical repetition, are used to provide a clear structure, without inhibiting a freer movement suggesting intuitions about time and the personal experience which has induced them.

This capacity to combine reflections on universal themes with notations of personal feeling, without departing from accepted conventions of form and expression, is an essential part of the formula developed by Lamartine. The méditation is thus a personal construction, and could hardly exist independently of the poet who conceived it. Isolated yet confidential, deeply involved with the life of his time, as well as with the universal questions, the spirit of Lamartine engaged the feelings of his readers as no poet had done for a century or more. Something aloof and intangible in his personality kept his poetry from becoming a confession, while the sense of vulnerability and world-weariness impinged larger than life on the sensibility of his contemporaries. Episodes and figures from his private life, where they occur in his poems, are transposed to a level of imagination which enables him, for example, to bring together references to mistresses other than Julie and to use the faintly surprising designation of 'Elvire'.

But the personal méditations are relatively few in number in the original volume. Lamartine is at pains to extend the range of his poetry to include public themes and fundamental questions of religion. In 'L'Homme', he is able to combine familiar references to the fashionable poet of the English Satanic School (he was unknown to Byron at this time) with references to his own life, which he uses as an exemplar of the human condition, and with a passionate plea for faith and confidence in the unseen divine purpose. Public themes become more numerous after his appointment to the Embassy at Naples in 1820 ('Ode sur la naissance du duc de Bordeaux' and the 'Ode' written to the French people were included in later editions of the Méditations poétiques, while 'Bonaparte' and 'La Liberté, ou Une Nuit à Rome', showing an evolved technique, were written for the Nouvelles Méditations of 1823). But the strongest theme, whether considered in the original collection or in the collected editions, is the theme of conflict between doubt and faith.

Concerned as he was to present himself as the new poet of a royalist and Catholic period, Lamartine hardly comes across in his religious poetry as orthodox in the matter of religion. 'Le Désespoir' and 'La Providence à l'homme', placed together in all editions, form a diptych, in which sentiments of revolt against a fallen and suffering world are countered and, supposedly, overwhelmed by the certitude that can be derived from the order of the universe and the magnificence of the earth and the heavens, symbols of a higher glory. The poem of revolt, originally called 'Ode au Malheur', is spoken according to a human perspective on creation. The reply is, supposedly, given by the Creator and is spoken in the first person, in the manner of the words of Jehovah in the Old Testament. These two pieces, the first of which gives a powerful, lyrical tone to an attitude of scepticism, were probably brought together in order to maintain, or perhaps to summarise in more dramatic form, the theme of conflicting forces in the poet's mind. In the poem to Byron, Lamartine concludes with what he calls 'l'hymne de la raison', in which reason is used to look beyond the discouraging realities of individual life towards the universal order in which existence has its context. The limitations of this same reason are asserted in 'L'Immortalité', where an idealism based on a symbolistic view of the world, attributed to Elvire, reverses the poet's pessimism and counters the view of materialist philosophers, the 'troupeau d'Épicure'. This view of nature as a symbolic temple forms much of the substance of 'La Prière', human intelligence being presented as the means whereby intuitions of a divine presence may be sought in the solitude of remote places. In 'La Foi', developing this theme of quest, he sets beyond death the stage of full revelation:

Cette raison superbe, insuffisant flambeau,
S'éteint comme la vie aux portes du tombeau,

And beyond death, too, the idealised presence of the lost mistress remains, still sensually apprehended. Flight into the 'pures régions' is evoked, in 'Dieu', as a natural movement of the poet's mind, bringing him, at privileged moments, 'face à face avec la réalité'. This 'reality' Lamartine attempts to convey by a description of God, represented in what appears to be a generally pantheistic view, as coextensive with the universe, sustaining and controlling it with His material being…. Lamartine's aim is to give a universalised vision of a God perceptible to human reason and freed from credulity and superstition, capable of intervening in the history of the world.

Successive and expanded editions of the Méditations poétiques, and the publication of the Nouvelles Méditations poétiques, added variations to the themes of the initial volume: 'Ischia' and 'Chant d'Amour', both from the 1823 collection, parallel the sublimated love poetry of 1816-20 with lyrical stanzas on shared happiness and amorous pleasure, prudently controlled by the conventions of decorum of the time; 'Les Étoiles', again from the second volume, adds a range of cosmic imagery to the lyrical, highly personalised treatment of the theme of individual consciousness; 'Bonaparte', begun at some point after the death of the Emperor in 1821 and completed in 1823, is a solidly constructed ode in which each stanza is marked by a dominant image accompanying the argument of the poem. But the vital contribution of Lamartine to the development of French poetry was made in 1820. Though in some respects the Nouvelles Méditations show a maturing of his talent, they are more uneven in quality, and the pressure of demand from his publishers to produce a second volume following the great success of the first, at a time when the style and condition of his life had changed considerably with his marriage and the beginnings of his diplomatic career in Italy, meant that he was obliged to return to earlier material, passed over for the first volume, in order to fill out the second.

La Mort de Socrate, also published in 1823, is an experimental poem of another type: longer than the meditation, which rarely extends to 200 lines, it develops, over approximately 800 lines, the themes of idealism and religious syncretism already seen in 'Dieu', but uses an episodic framework, based on Plato's Phaedo, in which Lamartine invests the final message of Socrates with his own lyrical view of death and immortality. Perhaps the return to classical sources and the narrative and descriptive form of the poem account for the relative lack of enthusiasm with which it was greeted on publication. It should nevertheless be said that in the main lines of its technique, the projection of ideas through a figure engaged in heroic or tragic action, it offers interesting points of comparison with some of Vigny's early pieces and that some of the descriptive effects already anticipate the manner of the Parnassians. A fourth work, Dernier Chant du Pèlerinage d'Harold (1825), was written after the death of Byron as an additional episode to those recounted in Byron's four cantos. Lamartine divides his "Chant" into forty-nine sections, all but one composed as a short sequence of alexandrine couplets, in place of the Spenserian stanzas used by Byron. The manner is grandiloquent and, in its superficial mannerisms, classical, with a more modern technique used in some of the descriptive and narrative passages. The soliloquies are used to present thinly disguised aspects of Lamartine's opinions and attitudes at a restless and perplexed period of his development.

Throughout the 1820s Lamartine had intuitions of a great poetic work to be accomplished, and ideas for a form of lyricism which would express, and possibly resolve, the religious problem which dominated his private thoughts at a time when his reputation and career were beginning to take him towards public life. These plans were to form the second half of his work as a poet and, historically, form part of the second decade of Romantic poetry. Lamartine's major contribution was already made, however, with the Méditations poétiques….

Lamartine, from the end of 1825 on diplomatic service in Florence, and back in France on indefinite leave in 1828, the star of the salons when he appeared in Paris, was … passing through a crucial stage in his relationship with his art. The epic poem, the 'Grand Poème' that he longed to write, while fearing that his time and his powers would not permit him to complete the vast design—the slow movement of a spirit towards redemption through many incarnations—was hardly taking shape. He fell back on a less ambitious enterprise, the composition, from about the spring of 1826, of a series of religious lyrics which he first called 'modern psalms'. A volume of these lyrics took shape over four years, appearing in 1830 under the title of Harmonies poétiques et religieuses. About half were written in a period of relative tranquillity in Italy, the others in the two years preceding the abdication of Charles X. The 'harmonies toscanes' were of more purely religious inspiration, those written in France reflect some of the unrest of the second crisis of his life. His political views were changing, and with the change the direction of his life was called into question. In his speech to the Académie Française on his reception in 1829, he publicly underlined his growing liberalism. During 1830, his decision was probably made to seek election as a député in the new government. But before this, a more immediate ambition remained: a grand tour of the Middle East and the Holy Land, where perhaps his religious doubts might be resolved. His mother's death in 1829 had deprived him of the strongest influence inclining him to Christian belief. He undertook the journey in 1831.

The principal motive for the composition of the Harmonies was, however, ambition. The title shows the continuing quest for artistic discovery, a stage beyond the Méditations. In a postscript to the Letter introducing his Harmonies in the 1849 edition, Lamartine gives a tentative definition in the form of a list of themes virtually coextensive with individual human life, and concludes with the following: 'tous les bruits de la vie dans un cœur sonore, ce sont ces harmonies… ' Lamartine's harmonies appear to be the transcription of the affective life of an individual and not concerned with external events in themselves. The realities on which they are based are the inner realities of the poet's mind, whether musing on the past, or on the prompting of impressions from the outside world, or (which is most often the case) on the disproportion between the evidence of life as lived in the world and the desire to savour the assurance of an unseen divine order. No clear sense of the term harmonies emerges from Lamartine's explanation, but the poems themselves suggest two levels of interpretation, corresponding respectively to the thought and the technique. At the first level, the poems invite interpretation as the blending of dissonant themes to achieve a final expression of elevation and hope. At the second, they can be taken, by virtue of their form, as analogous to musical compositions. In using the word 'psalm' to describe them, Lamartine was presumably thinking of the musical nature of the psalm, as well as of its inspiration, guided between songs of distress and paeans of praise and deliverance. In style and imagery, as well as in the handling of this great double theme, Lamartine follows the manner of the Psalms, but prefers labels such as hymne and cantate. These hymnes usually have the strophic variety of the ode, but the term is no doubt used by Lamartine to indicate a less complicated form, adapted to the celebrating of one theme, without the ornamental devices of the ode. Not all the poems follow this formula. The religious tension is relieved by shorter pieces developing immediate impressions: on sadness; to a nightingale; a woman singer. One great poem ('Novissima Verba') is a development of the méditation, moving retrospectively over the surface of the poet's life and illustrating the transient beauty and inconclusiveness of man's passage through the world.

In the Avertissement to the 1830 edition, Lamartine, in stressing the naturalness of his process of composition, describes his Harmonies as 'quatre livres de poésies écrites comme elles ont été senties, sans liaison et sans suite, sans transition apparente'. The mastery of form and the appearance of effortless development do indeed suggest the presence of a natural poet. But the volume is carefully prepared and carefully ordered. The seventy-two poems of the original edition are distributed more or less equally over the four books referred to. Books ι and II are forms of reflection on a missing reality and on the means of stirring the human consciousness to awareness of the Creator. These are suggested through symbols, subjects of meditation for the solitary mind: the solar cycle ('Hymne de la nuit'; 'Hymne du matin'); the lamp in the sanctuary ('La Lampe du temple'); a moonlit landscape ('Poésie, ou Paysage dans le Golfe de Gênes'); the destruction of a famous Roman landscape ('La Perte de l'Anio'); images of time and change ('La Source dans les bois d'***'). A sequence of four powerful odes on the idea of God conveys, through sets of images, a historical and, in some respects, evolutionary view of religious consciousness, combining modern attitudes with a range of poetic effect, from recitative based on the Old Testament ('Jehova'), to the demonstrative stanza of the traditional ode ('Le Chêne'), and to a more personal lyrical style ('L'Humanité', 'L'Idée de Dieu'). These four poems, presenting a view of the progressive nature of religions and a vision of man caught between two mysteries, mortality and immortality, form the centre of the first two books. In Books III and IV, Lamartine concentrates pieces in a more familiar style, tracing reminiscences and impressions of his personal life ('Milly, ou La Terre natale' is one of his best-known poems in this descriptive and reflective register). These are grouped round two poems, in each of which the poet sets down an aspect of his credo. 'Hymne au Christ' is an affirmation of his attachment to the Christian faith in an age of doubt and conflicting doctrines. 'Novissima Verba' is a survey of the values of his life, now seen as dominated by tokens of mortality and fragments of truth. Such tokens and fragments are the substance of short pieces of Books III and IV ('Le Tombeau d'une mère' is written on the death of his mother; 'Le Premier Regret' evokes memories of Graziella and Italy more than fifteen years before).

The religious theme, basically the conflict of doubt and faith and the quest for evidence from human experience that might abolish doubt, is continued from the Méditations, where it had found its most dramatic expression in 'Le Désespoir' and 'La Providence à l'homme'. The central conflict is no nearer resolution in the Harmonies. The 'Hymne au Christ' is largely about the growing challenge to the values brought to the world by Christ. The religious elevation of Books I and II is a form of idealism whose associations range over religions in general. In Lamartine's eyes, no doubt, this poetry was modern and original in that it brought the historical perspectives of contemporary thought into the same lyrical framework as the sacred songs of the Old Testament. It also marked a stage in the development of the long tradition of biblical paraphrase by French poets. Further, the adaptation of techniques and style to the variations which the religious theme demands is at a level probably not reached before. The fixed forms of individual poems keep largely to the alexandrine or octosyllabic line; but there are also short experimental pieces in a melodic style ('La Tristesse', 'Le Rossignol'), in which already something of the tone of Verlaine is heard. But it is in the hymnes and the odes that the control of form is at its finest. Within the long poems of free construction, the modulations are obtained by striking metrical variety (lines of seven or five syllables are used to particular effect) marking the stages of the theme.

This inventiveness is part of the Romantic renewal of poetry, and has its counterpart, at another level, in Hugo's Orientales. But Hugo's verse marks also an advance towards modernity in the enlargement of poetic vocabulary for greater precision in pictorial effect. Lamartine, despite his awareness of the need for change, did not follow in this direction. While his syntax is mainly free from the inversion and periphrasis of the style of the previous century, his vocabulary is marked by influences from the Old Testament and by the persistence of stylised classical elements. This is one reason why his Harmonies, where his artistic powers are at their height, did not have any decisive effect on the course of lyrical poetry in France. Another, and more cogent, reason is that attitudes were changing. Liberalism and scepticism were replacing, among the literary generation of 1830, the Catholicism and royalism that Hugo had confidently predicted for the society of the Restoration…. Lamartine himself saw fit to orientate his book more closely towards the contemporary world by adding to the 1832 edition an important ode: 'Les Révolutions', on the theme of progress, and in which he castigates the instinct of peoples and rulers to perpetuate an existing order, and summons them to accept change, however violent or unpredictable, as part of an ordained movement towards a more perfect state. But other issues occupied the minds of younger writers in 1830, and Lamartine's lessons of idealism and lyricism, appreciated as they were by the public of the time, drew him few disciples….

By 1833 the Romantic movement in French poetry had done its work. Starting with the regeneration of poetic forms, the search for a new immediacy of expression and the adaptation of verse to public as well as private themes, it had produced, in something over a decade, an enlargement of poetry which enabled it to cover religious, philosophical and historical subjects in a highly individual manner, largely free from didacticism. This was made possible by three developments of technique. First, discoveries were made, principally by Lamartine and Hugo, about the increased impact of imagery once freed from the formality of classical reference and made a necessary part of the poet's invention. Secondly, by exploiting areas of familiar and technical language hitherto closed to writers of verse, the Romantics greatly increased the scope of poetry by putting it on a direct footing with contemporary life…. Thirdly, the renewal of the expressive power of poetry needed a wealth of stanza forms and a verse instrument better attuned to modern syntax and language. The modifications brought to the alexandrine, discrete enough in themselves, provoked much opposition in their time but, once accepted and integrated, lasted without much further change until the Symbolist experiments of 1886….

Lamartine's concern with the epic has already been noted. His 'Grand Poème', conceived in a burst of visionary fervour as early as 1821, was to have been an immense work providing a scenario of human progress. Preliminary fragments written between 1823 and 1829, and partially published by Lamartine in 1851 in his Nouvelles Confidences, indicate something of the visionary and episodic intentions of the work. The theme was to be one already treated, notably by Byron and Vigny, and the line of the narrative was to be determined by the stages of the redemption of the spirit of a fallen angel through successive reincarnations. The ending of La Chute d'un ange indicates that nine such episodes were envisaged.

In the event, only two were carried through as far as publication: Jocelyn (1836) and La Chute d'un ange (1838). Published in this order, as separate volumes, the two works could have given little idea of the plan on which they were based. Jocelyn, deliberately pitched at the human level, recounts the sacrifice of the life's happiness of two beings thrown together in the solitude of a mountain refuge during the Revolution. The plot, straining credibility at times, follows the movement of the poem over nine époques covering seventeen years (1786-1803): a love idyll (époques 1-4); a crucial event (époque 5—Jocelyn's enforced ordination before the execution of his bishop); the years of austere and humble dedication (époques 6-9), with the theme of the embittered and fallen life of Laurence as counter-point, but redeemed by religion and by the hope also of the spiritual union after death of the soul-mates, separated in their lives. The poem is given further amplitude by passages of religious lyricism, descriptions of the changing seasons in the mountainous region of France known to Lamartine, and evocations of the humble rustic life shared by the priest.

The episode of redemption therefore precedes the initial account of the Fall. La Chute d'un ange is a fictionalised interpretation of the verses of Genesis describing the world before the Flood. Lamartine's angle, Cédar, obsessed by the human beauty of Daïdha, assumes human shape to rescue her from a group of giant pillaging barbarians. The fifteen visions into which the poem is divided recount the doomed idyll of this pair, a girl of the race of Cain and a semi-divine but primitive being unversed in human lore. Their wanderings take them to the cave of a prophet who, in the seventh and eighth visions, reveals to them the fundamentals of a divine code set down in a 'fragment du Livre primitif. The doctrine is drawn from Lamartine's own brand of deism, idealism and enlightened rationalism, which is presented as the essential basis of true religious belief. The tribulations of the pair continue in Nemphed's city of giants and demi-gods, from whose barbaric violence they eventually escape only to perish in the desert, Cédar burning on a pyre of his own making, with the bodies of Daïdha and their twin children.

Epic in its conception and in the main lines of its action, La Chute d'un ange is a sadly imperfect work, largely through the haste and inattention with which it was composed, partly through the incongruities occurring in the attempt to prepare a biblical epic for popular consumption. The level of the action is mainly that of a sensational adventure story. Cédar's Homeric combat with the six giant cavemen in the second vision has all the ingredients of a Hollywood fight sequence. Yet there is a ferocity of imagination, in the monstrous prison scenes for example, which surprises and suggests a range of resources never exploited in any measure by Lamartine. In any case, the 'épopée métaphysique' was a forlorn venture at this stage of his life. His ideas on progress based on a religious rationalism, which he had hoped to communicate to a large section of the French people, were absorbed into his political life, or diverted into works of fiction….