THE GIRONDISTS, JACOBINS, AND M. DE LAMARTINE, DEPUTY FOR MACON.* If Byron, more than a quarter of a century ago, then in the height of his political fame, had announced his intention to write a history of any particular event or party in modern times-such, for instance, as the Revolution of 1688, or the Whigs and Charles James Fox - the circumstance would have created, even in matter-of-fact England, excitement, wonder, and most uncommon interest. What, then, must have been the excitement in most excitable and mercurial France, when the author of the Meditations Poétiques, of the Voyage en Orient, and Jocelyn, had undertaken to produce eight volumes of his tory in eighteen months; and of history, too, which has been already handled by some of the most able and eloquent pens in France! In all civilized European countries, the flights of poets and the functions of historians have been hitherto deemed nearly incompatible; and though there are exceptions, as in the case of Schiller and Sir Walter Scott, yet these exceptions do but prove the universality of the rule. Neither Hume, Gibbon, Robertson, Hallam, nor Lingard, among ourselves, were addicted to poetry; or, that we are aware of, have Thierry, Mignet, Lacretelle, Anquetil, Guizot, or Thiers, ever lisped in numbers, whether in infancy or manhood. Nor do the Italians or Spaniards furnish us with poet-historians. Machiavelli, indeed, composed a drama - The Mandragola; but neither Father Paul, Giannone, Muratori, Denina, nor Guicciardini Mariana, can be considered as having contributed to poetry. We do not mean to say that it is not possible for a poet to be an historian, or an orator to be a writer: but the combination of such gifts are of the rarest; and if the poetical fervor and temperament predominate over the reasoning and reflective faculties, what we gain in coloring and imagery we lose in body and substance. In his personal character and career, Alphonse de Lamartine has displayed all the waywardness and eccentricity of the poetical character. He has been every thing by fits, and nothing long. He has been monarchical under Louis XVIII. and Charles X.; dynastic in the earlier part of the reign of Louis Philippe; and now, according to his last speech at Mâcon, he is democratic, if not republican, in the extremest sense. These changes in a man of fifty-five or fifty-six, all of which are sincere, and all of which produce, so long as they last, passionate and picturesque expression, sufficiently indicate the predominance of that impressionableness and enthusiasm, generally the incidents of the poetical faculty, in the deputy for Mâcon. From his earliest years. from the period when, as a thoughtful and melancholy infant reading the Bible at his mother's knee, in the rude and uncongenial climate of Burgundy - he wept and wondered by turns, Lamartine truly was in heart and soul a poet. And these dreams of his youth were not obliterated by foreign travel, or by the reaction of the Restoration, which found him returned to France an accomplished but timid and reserved young man, in his twenty-third or twenty-fourth year. From 1814 to 1816, he served two years in the cavalry; but during this period he thought more of Byron, and Goethe, and De Béranger, and of that Italy in which he had spent a portion of his early manhood, than of all the great captains which France produced, from Du Guesclin and Bayard, down to Catinat and Dumouriez. For it would not answer for a Royalist officer in those days to accord any merit to "le petit Caporal" and his cloud of upstart marshals without birth or breeding. The clangor of arms had at this period ceased in France, but the voice of the poet was-except in one instance-scarcely heard. Ideas, however, were beginning to germinate, and literature to re-assert its rights. The eloquent prose of Chateaubriand was listened to under the reign of a lettered king, himself both author and translator. People were fatigued with battles, and blood, and conquest, and its bitter fruits; and even the elite, though disliking De Béranger, felt the want of something to take the place of such poetry as was afforded by the materialist school of Delille. There was but that most glorious, most pathetic, most tender, and most natural of ballad writers, who presented himself. Many of the songs of this brilliant writer caused the hearts of even ultra-Royalists to palpitate; but the Napoleonic and ultra-democratic tendency of his strophes could be neither forgotten nor forgiven by the France of the Restoration: therefore, for want of a really national poet, les êtres -- -- bien pensants fell, from 1814 to 1819, on transla- | De Lamartine defended his adversary, and pretions from Byron and Goethe, which were read vented Pepé from becoming a second or a third and admired, not merely in the Faubourg St. time a wanderer and an exile. Germain, but in the Chaussée d'Antin. But in 1820, the young Royalist, who had drunk of the inspiration of Goethe and of Byron, who admired Chateaubriand and relished-Royalist though he was- De Béranger, returned to his country, and entered the gardes du corps. In the sombre allées of St. Cloud - in the wild walks of the forest of Fontainbleau- in the trim gardens of Versailles in the cloudy climate of Burgundy, and in the heart of the vines of the Côte d'Or, he produced his Méditations Poétiques. The small volume was soon printed and launched on the waters; and within a week after it had been read, literary France hailed the book and its author with transports of enthusiasm, as the greatest poetical genius of the country. This was in 1820; and though De Béranger was then cherished by the fond and faithful few all the more because he was oppressed, and persecuted, and tolerated by the Royalists for his exquisite pathos, polish, and style, and feeling, so eminently French; yet the pages of Lamartine caused the descriptive style of Delille, the materialist poetry of Parny, and the epigrammatic poetry of Voltaire and Lebrun, to pall on the public taste. Though in different walks, De Béranger and Lamartine divided the public favor and popularity. The Harmonies Poétiques produced for their author a European reputation. They were accepted by France as the sentiments and feelings of a poetical nature —as pages in the private life of a gifted and impressionable man -pages written sometimes under the impression of melancholy and sadness—sometimes of hope and joy, and the bright influences of society-sometimes of despondency and gloom. This was in the beginning of 1829. Before the autumn of the year the Polignac ministry was formed, and Jules de Polignac, who had a high opinion of Lamartine, offered the poet the post of foreign affairs, which he had the good sense to decline. Subsequently he was named minister plenipotentiary to Greece, but he had not left Paris to occupy his post when the Revolution of 1830 broke out. But though his brother's family had served the House of Orleans, and the Government of July offered to ratify the appointment of their predecessors, still, not even his desire to visit the classic land of Greece could induce Lamartine to pass so rapidly over from the vanquished to the victors. No: like a gentleman and a poet, he resigned his post, and becoming again a simple citizen, paid his last respectful homage to his mistaken and misguided Charles X. In 1831 he set out for the East, to make that journey which has since become world-renowned in his best known work, the Voyage en Orient, and which from the style reminds us of the work now under review. During his travels he lost at Beyrout a loved, and we believe an only daughter. It was in this famous tour, in January, 1833, he learned, when at Jerusalem, that he had been elected deputy for Bergues. He returned to France in the course of 1833, published his Trav The first volume of Méditations was followed by a second, and the second by a Dernier Chant du Pélerinage d'Harold. In 1821 M. de Lamartine, then in the zenith of his fame, married, we believe, an English lady of good fortune, at least, a lady born in England, whose family possessed some estates in that bold Burgundy in which he first saw the light. Soon after his marriage he was appointed secretary of embassy at Naples, where he won golden opinions by the grace and amenity of his manners. It was under the charmels in the East, and took his place in the Chamand inspiration of an Italian sky, and amidst the turmoil of daily labor, that he composed his Harmonies Poétiques. After having filled the place of secretary of embassy at Naples, Rome, and Florence, Charles X. appointed him, in 1825, his chargé d'affaires in Tuscany. At Florence he became the favorite and friend of the grand duke. There was scarcely a day that the prince and poet did not see each other. The excellent sovereign condescended to treat his friend as though he himself were not a prince, but a gentleman and a man of letters, as he is, as we have ourselves known him, and must ever be. It was while residing at Florence that Lamartine had that duel with General Pepé, which created such a sensation at the time, and in which the poet was slightly wounded. The grand duke was for expelling Pepé from the Tuscan territory, but ber. From the commencement of the session of 1834, his voice was first heard at the tribune; but though he discoursed of matters neither practical or material, it was plain enough that he had many of the gifts of the orator, and that he might one day hope to be among the most prominent and popular, as he was even thus early one of the most gifted and noblepurposed, speakers in the chamber. His speech on the discussion of the address disclosed broad and large views, and so acceptable were they to the nation at large, that in 1834 the poet-orator was named for Mâcon, his native city, as well as for Bergues. His speeches in 1837 on Education, on the subject of Algiers, and on the Sugar question, revealed less and less of the poet and more of the man of the world, desiring to handle affairs as a statesman and politician, but withal they were marked with the im press of a fervid imagination. He supported at this season the Molé cabinet, and it is probable, if that statesman had continued in office he would have offered to Lamartine a portfolio. In 1839, the future author of the Girondins was reporter of the budget on foreign affairs; and, probably, seeing the fame which M. Thiers had acquired as an historian, and how considerably this fame had subserved his views as a politician, he resolved at this time to become an historian too. But, meanwhile, he continued to labor on in a different walk of literature, and produced that remarkable work, Jocelyn. That his imagination was not, however, cultivated at this period, to the exclusion of other faculties, is apparent from the admirable speech he made against the infliction of the punishment of death, a speech which extorted encomiums from those who deemed it necessary to continue the punishment. In 1840, Lamartine made the knowledge he had acquired as a traveller subsidiary to his views on the Eastern question; and applied the language and the generous sympathies of a poet and a man of heart and feeling to a foreign question. From 1841 to the present time he has taken always a considerable, and often a permanent, share in the labor of the Chamber. He voted against the fortifications of Paris, against the arming of the detached forts; took a leading part on all discussions on foreign politics, and was almost always to be found on the generous, noble, and humane side. Thus he was the first to defend the Legitimist Deputies who proceeded to pay their homage to the pilgrim of Belgrave Square, and was also prompt to defend Emile de Girardin, the clever editor of the Presse, against whom an ungenerous set had been made. This again showed the generous and chivalrous instinct of the poet, which no commerce with men, no mixing with the politicians and intriguers of a corrupt court could chill or repress. But though the thoughts and conceptions of Lamartine were as lofty and poetical as ever, yet his style of speaking had unquestionably undergone a considerable change. It had become more simple and less stilted and solemn in outward form; but still you saw before you the poet of fervid impressions and warm imagination. Why do we enter into these particulars? the reader may ask. For no other purpose, then, but to show the type and character of Lamartine's mind, and to announce to him the fact, that he is not to expect in the work before us that weighing and winnowing that poising and balancing of evidence that judicial discrimination in sifting out and eliminating the truth, which are among the chief merits of the historian. But a magnificent and oratorical style-spangled with gems, some of "purest ray serene," some - dazzling and gaudy even to gairishness - - abundant yet prolix - rhythmical and measured, yet wanting occasionally in variety he is sure to find in every chapter. It was, however, notwithstanding all Lamartine's genius, a bold task for him to undertake this labor in the middle of the year 1847. The history of the time had been written at the time by some who were actors and some who were observers, either in the shape of memoirs, sketches, or more pretentious works. First, there were the memoirs of the able and instructed De Bouillé, which appeared first in England in 1797, and afterwards in Paris, after the marquis's death, in 1801, and which were subsequently published in the collection of memoirs relative to the French Revolution, by Berville and Barrière, in 1821. On these volumes, written, as Mallet du Pan says, with the straightforwardness of a soldier and the veracity of an honest man, M. de Lamartine has largely drawn, though he does not share their authors' opinions as to Philip Egalité, whom De Bouillé who knew him well, calls the most atrocious and meanest of villains. Secondly, there were the memoirs of the ingenious, enterprising, and able Dumouriez, soldier, scholar, traveller, diplomatist, general-inchief, exile; who had fought in the seven years' war, — travelled in Italy, Spain, Corsica, Poland, Sweden; who had been charged with several missions in 1769, 1770, 1775, 1776, and 1777; and who on one of those occasions, in doing the secret work of the monarch Louis XV., which the king had not communicated to his minister, was by that minister, the Duke d'Aiguillon, cast into the Bastille. These memoirs, written with spirit and intelligence, are in themselves a rich mine of history, biography, and anecdote. There are also the memoirs of the irresolute Servan, a short time minister of war; the memoirs of Riouffe on the Reign of Terror; of Puisaye and La Rochejacquelain on the war of La Vendée; of Bezenval on the army and the court; of Mallet du Pan and Camille Desmoulins; of the Marquis de Ferrières and Bailly; of Bertrand de Moleville who published a History of the Revolution in ten volumes, Annals of the Revolution in nine volumes, and Memoirs on the Reign of Louis XVI. so late as 1816; and last, though not least, among a multitude of others, there are the memoirs of the gifted, courageous, and unfortunate Madame Roland, published, in the collection of Berville and Barrière, by Bossange in 1820. From all these from the commentaries of Benner, the collections of Buchez and Rouz,- Toulougeon and Lacretelle,- Félix Bodin, Thiers, and Mignet, have already composed histories, three of which are classical, - we mean the works of Lacretelle, Mignet, and Thiers. Why, therefore, it may be asked, has M. de Lamartine written? -as not give a single date; nor is there a summary, a heading, or a table of contents, to help the reader. Anquitil and Mongalliard give, as well as we remember, the precise age of the famous orator (he was forty-two years of age), and insinuate, if they do not assert, that he was poisoned; but these details are above the attention of a poet, and M. de Lamartine does not think it necessary to allude to them. Neither does he tell his readers one word as to the magnificence of the funeral, other than that bells tolled and minute-guns were fired. He does not at all Illustrious in poetry, he wishes to achieve addi- | to the ending of his book, M. de Lamartine does tional renown, not merely as a poet, politician, and orator, but as a historical writer. He perceives that other public men in FranceGuizot, Thiers, De Barante, St. Aulaire, De Salvandy, and Mignet-have rendered themselves celebrated by historical writings; that Ancillon and Savigny have so become celebrated in Prussia; and he knows no reason why he, too, should not try his hand against the fatalist school of French historians. But, in undertaking his task, the deputy for Mâcon has proceeded to write history as he would compose a poem or a drama. He has created heroes and victims-deem it necessary to state that all the public interesting episodes and disastrous situations. We have portraits, anon in the richest coloring, anon in the deepest shade; but though this is exciting and agreeable reading, it is not history in the proper sense of the word, but eloquent and picturesque melodrama. Indeed, M. de Lamartine fully admits it is not history; for, in his preface, he says, "Ce livre n'a pas les prétensions de l'histoire, il ne doit pas en affecter la solennité." In another sentence, he says it is an intermediate labor between history and memoirs. Events do not occupy so much space as men and ideas. It is a study of a group of men and a few months of revolution. When an author speaks so humbly—so diffidently, he must, indeed, be a hardhearted and snarling critic who would take him to task. We have written, says M. de Lamartine, after having scrupulously investigated facts and characters, "Nous ne demandons pas foi sur parole." How this may be we cannot undertake positively to say; but as assiduous readers of the French newspapers, and more especially of the Débats, Constitutionnel, and Siècle, we positively aver that there has never, within our recollection, been published a work in which the relatives, direct and collateral, of the parties spoken of, have so numerously rushed into print to correct inaccuracies. Scarcely a day has passed for the four last months that some relative, or connexion, or descendant, of some of the parties spoken of, has not written to rectify some mistake, important or unimportant. Many of these persons, we admit, have shown an over-susceptibility; and some of them have endeavouredvery naturally, though the task were equally vain and impossible-to brighten the ruined character of some of their relatives; but, in numerous instances, M. de Lamartine has been careless and hasty, and has entrusted to others the performance of duties which he ought to have himself undertaken in person. He commences his history rather arbitrarily at the deathbed of Mirabeau, i. e. April 2, 1791; for, with the true carelessness of a poet, from the beginning places of amusement were shut, and that the National Assembly ordered a mourning of eight days. The following general sketch of the man is graphic, and most dramatically told, and we find the meaning of the author tolerably fairly translated in Bohn's Standard Library :· "Mirabeau's education was as rough and as rude as the hand of his father, who was styled the friend of man, but whose restless spirit and selfish vanity rendered him the persecutor of his wife, and the tyrant of all his family. The only virtue he was taught was honor, for by that name in those days they dignified that ceremonious demeanour which was too frequently but Entering the army at an early age, he acquired the show of probity, and the elegance of vice. nothing of military habits, except a love of licentiousness and play. The hand of his father was constantly extended, not to aid him in rising, but to depress him. His youth was passed in the prisons of the State. * * 案 command, to attempt to form a marriage, beset "Released from gaol, in order, by his father's with difficulties, with Mademoiselle de Marignan, a rich heiress of one of the greatest families of Provence, he displayed like a wrestler, all kinds of stratagems and daring schemes of policy in the small theatre of Aix. Cunning, seduction, courage, he used every resource of his nature to succeed, and he succeeded; but he beset him, and the stronghold of Pontarlier was hardly married before fresh persecutions gaped to enclose him. A love, which his Lettres à Sophie has rendered immortal, opened its gates and freed him. He carried off Madame de Monier from her aged husband. The lovers, happy for some months, took refuge in Holland; they were seized there, separated, and shut up, the one in a convent, and the other in the dungeon of Vincennes. Love, which, like fire in the veins of the earth, is always detected in some crevice of man's destiny, lighted in a single and ardent blaze all Mirabeau's passions. In his vengeance, it was outraged love that he appeased in liberty, it was love which he sought and which delivered him; in study, it ing obscure into his cell, he quitted it a writer, was love which still illustrated his path. Enterorator, statesman, but perverted-ripe for any thing, even to sell himself, in order to buy for 66 * From the moment of his entry into the National Assembly he filled it; he was the whole people. His gestures were commands; his movements coups d'état. He placed himself on a level with the throne, and the nobility felt itself subdued by a power emanating from its own body. The clergy, which is the people, and desires to reconcile the democracy with the Church, lends him its influence, in order to destroy the double aristocracy of the nobility and bishops. "All that had been built by antiquity, and cemented by ages, fell in a few months. Mirabeau alone preserved his presence of mind in the midst of this ruin. His character of tribune ceases, that of the statesman begins, and in this he is even greater than in the other. There, when all else creep and crawl, he acts with firmness, and advances boldly. The Revolution in his brain is no longer a momentary idea it is a settled plan. The philosophy of the eighteenth century, moderated by the prudence of policy, flows easily and modelled from his lips. His eloquence, imperative as the law, is now the talent of giving force to reason. His language lights and inspires every thing; and though almost alone at this moment, he has the courage to remain alone. * * * He speaks to men now only in the name of his genius. This title is enough to cause obedience to him. His power is based on the assent which truth finds in all minds, and his strength again reverts to him. He contests with all parties, and rises superior to one and all. All hate him because he commands; and all seek him because he can serve or destroy them. He does not give himself up to any one, but negotiates with each: he lays down calmly on the tumultuous element of this assembly, the basis of the reformed constitution: legislation, finance, diplomacy, war, religion, political economy, balances of power, every question he approaches and solves, not as an Utopian, but as a politician. The solution he gives is always the precise mean between the theoretical and the practical. He places reason on a level with manners, and the institutions of the land in consonance with its habits. He desires a throne to support the democracy, liberty in the chambers, and in the will of the nation, one and irresistible in the government. The characteristic of his genius, so well defined, so ill understood, was less audacity than justness. Beneath the grandeur of his expression is always to be found unfailing good sense. His very vices could not repress the clearness, the sincerity, of his understanding. "At the foot of the tribune he was a man devoid of shame or virtue; in the tribune he was an honest man. Abandoned to private debauchery, bought over by foreign powers, sold to the court in order to satisfy his lavish expenditure, he preserved, amidst all this infamous traffic of his powers, the incorruptibility of his genius. * 6 *The people were not his devotees; his own glory was the god of his idolatry; his faith was posterity; his conscience existed but in his thought; the chilling materialism of his age had crushed in his heart the expansion, force, and craving for imperishable things. His dying words were, Sprinkle me with perfume, crown me with flowers, that I may thus enter upon an eternal sleep. He was especially of his time, and his course bears no impress of infinity. Neither his character, his acts, nor his thoughts, have the brand of immortality. If he had believed in God, he might have died a martyr, but he would have left behind him the religion of reason, and the reign of democracy." Two of the lines of this description are singularly applicable to our own Sheridan: "Au pied de la tribune c'est un homme sans pudeur et sans vertu; à la tribune c'est un honnête homme." The observations of M. de Lamartine on the effect which Fénélon, Rousseau, and Voltaire had in producing the Revolution, are too remarkable not to be extracted at length: "Fénélon educated another revolution in the Duke of Burgundy. This the king perceived when too late, and expelled the divine seduction from his palace. But the revolutionary policy was born there; there the people read the pages of the holy archbishop: Versailles was destined to be, thanks to Louis XIV. and Fénélon, at once the palace of despotism, and the cradle of the Revolution. Montesquieu had sounded the institutions, and analysed the laws of all people. By classing governments he had compared them, by comparing he passed judgment on them. ** "Jean Jacques Rousseau, less ingenious, but more eloquent, had studied politics, not in the laws, but in nature. A free but oppressed and suffering mind, the palpitation of his noble heart had made every heart beat that had been ulcerated by the odious inequality of social conditions. ***There was to be seen the design of God, and the excess of His love, but there was not enough seen of the infirmity of men. It was the Utopia of government; but by this Rousseau led further astray. *** Rousseau was the ideal of Politics, as Fénélon was the ideal of Christianity. "Voltaire had the genius of criticism, that power of raillery which withers all it overthrows. He had made human nature laugh at itself,had felled it low in order to raise it, had laid bare before it all errors, prejudices, iniquities, and crimes of ignorance; he had urged it to rebellion against consecrated ideas, not by the ideal, but by sheer contempt. Destiny gave |