MEDITATIONS OF LAMARTINI The 'Meditations' (1820) and (Nouvelles Meditations' (1823) of Lamartine should be counted rather as heralds of the Romani School of French poetry than as products of
former, its authors first publication—he was then 30— appeared five years after Water loo. Its sentimentalized melancholy voiced SC admirably the temper of that period of politici reaction and moral exhaustion that it achieved; success in its day hardly paralleled. Its appei was to the cultured only, but 40,000 copies c. the
were sold in four months The modern reader must strive to realize thz temper of 1820 if he would comprehend hey these rather thin and always superficial reflec tions on the relations of man to
creation of the poet's morbidity, with little rela tion to reality— rather than to his fellowmr_ found admiration so ardent, that succesittc volumes of verses, in his own phrase, "fell frr-c my pen like drops of evening dew,' while the poet found himself "incapable of the exams: labor of the file and of criticism." The sc.. of the poet," he writes in a volume of To.....
"is a running brook which writes us murmurs and sings them, but we write titer with human notes and Nature with the notes el God." The
were the work of ar army officer, but it was the army of the Re. toration, more responsive to Rousseau's all fa' a return to nature and to Chateaubriand's a return to religious emotionalism than it was to any summons to action. When that
passed and France recovered the energy du! showed itself in politics by the Revolution 01 1830 and in literature by the Romantic School the
ing value, greater than their merit of content or of form.
Lamartine's verses preserve much of the verbal mannerisms of the earlier period. They are harmonious, refined, delicate, graceful, sin cere, spontaneous, "the indolent pleasure of a too-richly gifted mind.° On the other side they are conventional in expression, monoto nous in feeling, elusive in development. The themes are throughout those of the true lyric — nature, love, death. The essence of all La martine's voluminous poetic effusion can be seen in its full potency in some of the very earliest of the 'Meditations,' for instance, in The Lake (Le Lac), accounted by some to be La martine's best poem, in Loneliness (L'Isole ment), and in the vague pantheistic melancholy of Prayer (La Prtere). In the 'Nouvelles Meditations) the poet's congenial marriage is re flected in the 1 .1..11,41 %du of the Lt,“_ S,ng (Chant d'Amour), Wisdom (La Sagesse), Is chia and The Preludes (Les Preludes), but the poet soon resumes the melancholy pose. The Ode on Bonaparte in this collection goes deeper and rises higher than is usual in La martine; as indeed there is unwonted grace in Ischia and force in The Crucifix. Never so popular as the earlier hook, (Nouvel Medi tations) are preferred by many critics, and Brunetiere even pronounced them at once the noblest and the most vo/uptueur in French po etry' It is juster to say, with Lannon, that if, and so far as, poetry is essentially sentiment, disengaged from the ideas and facts that pro duce or accompany sentiment, the (Meditations) are great poetry and Lamartine is among the most poetic of poets. Consult 'Life of Lamar tine> by H. R. Whitehouse (New York 1919).