LAMARTINE 233
before long he received the news of his election by a constituency (Bergues) in the department of the Nord. He returned through Turkey and Germany, and made his first speech shortly after the beginning of 1834. Thereafter he spoke constantly, and acquired considerable reputation as an orator, – bringing out, moreover, many books in prose and verse. His Eastern travels (Souvenirs d'Orient) appeared in 1835, his Jocelyn in 1836, his Chute d'un Ange in 1838, and his Recueillements, the last remarkable volume of his poetry, in 1839. As the reign of Louis Philippe went on, Lamartine, who had previously been a liberal royalist, something after the fashion of Chateaubriand, became more and more democratic in his opinions. He set about his greatest prose work, the Histoire des Girondins, which at first appeared periodically, and was published as a whole in 1847. Like many other French histories, it was a pamphlet as well as a chronicle, and the subjects of Lamartine's pen became his models in politics. At the revolution of February Lamartine at once became one of the most important personages in France. He was one of the first to declare for a provisional government, and became a member of it himself, with the post of minister for foreign affairs. He was elected for the new constituent assembly in ten different departments, and was chosen one of the five members of the Executive Committee. For a few months indeed Lamartine, who for nearly sixty years had been a distinguished man of letters, an official of inferior rank in diplomacy, and an eloquent but unpractical speaker in parliament, became one of the foremost men in Europe. His own inexperience in the routine work of government, the utterly unpractical nature of his colleagues and of the constitution which they endeavoured to carry out, and the turbulence of the Parisian mob proved fatal to his chances. During his brief tenure of office Lamartine gave some proofs of statesmanlike ability, notably in his reply to the deputation of United Irishmen who visited him in the hope that the new French democracy would take up the old hatred of the republic against England; and his eloquence was repeatedly called into requisition to pacify the Parisians. But no one can permanently carry on the government of a great country by speeches from the balcony of a house in the capital, and Lamartine found himself in a dilemma. So long as he held aloof from Ledru-Rollin and the more radical of his colleagues, the disunion resulting weakened the Government; as soon as he effected an approximation to them, the middle classes, who more in France than any where else were and are the arbiters of Governments, fell off from him. The quelling of the insurrection of the 15th May was his last successful act. A month later the renewal of active disturbances brought on the fighting of June, and Lamartine's influence was extinguished in favour of Cavaignac. There is hardly another instance on record of so sudden an elevation and so rapid a fall. Before February in 1848 Lamartine was, as has been said, a private person of talent and reputation; after June in the same year he was once more the same, except that his chance of political pre-eminence was gone. He had been tried and found wanting, having neither the virtues nor the vices of his situation. In January 1849, though he was nominated for the presidency, only a few thousand votes were given to him, and three months later he was not even elected to the legislative assembly.
The remaining story of Lamartine's life is somewhat melancholy. He had never been a rich man, nor had he been a saving one, and during his period of popularity and office he had incurred great expenses. He now set to work to repair his fortune by unremitting literary labour. He brought out in the Presse a series of Confidences, and somewhat later a kind of autobiography, entitled Raphael, which treated his own experiences in romantic fashion. He began and finished several historical works of more or less importance, the History of the Revolution of 1848, The History of the Restoration, The History of Turkey, The History of Russia, besides a very large number of small biographical and miscellaneous works. In 1858 a subscription was opened for his benefit. Two years afterwards, following the example of Chateaubriand, he supervised an elaborate edition of his own works in forty-one volumes. This occupied five years, and while he was engaged on it his wife died (1863). He was now a man of more than seventy years old; his powers had deserted him, and even if they had not the public taste had entirely changed, and was no longer disposed to welcome or enjoy his sentimental fashion of handling prose and poetry. His efforts had not succeeded in placing him in a position of comfort and independence; and at last, in 1867, the Government of the empire (from which he had perforce stood aloof, though he never considered it necessary to adopt the active protesting attitude of Quinet and Victor Hugo) came forward to his assistance, a vote of twenty thousand pounds being proposed in April of that year for his benefit by M. Émile Ollivier. In no other country than France would this have been anything but creditable to both parties, for Lamartine, both as a distinguished man of letters and as a past servant of the state, had every claim to the bounty of his country. But the bitter party feeling which animated the later years of the reign of Napoleon III. made the grant something of a party matter, and Lamartine was reproached for accepting it by the extreme republicans and irreconcilables. He did not enjoy it long, dying, as has been said, on the 1st of March 1869, two years before the collapse of the empire.
As a statesman Lamartine was placed during his brief tenure of office in a position from which it would have been almost impossible for any man who was not prepared and able to play the dictator to emerge with credit. At no time in history, not even in the great revolution of sixty years earlier, were unpractical crotchets so rife in the heads of men as in 1848, and at no time was there such an absence of what may be called backbone in a nation as then in France. But Lamartine could hardly have guided the ship of state safely even in much calmer weather. Personally he was amiable and even estimable, the chief fault of his character being vanity and an incurable tendency towards theatrical effect, which makes his travels, memoirs, and other personal records as well as his historical works radically untrustworthy. Nor does it appear that he had any settled political ideas. He was first an ardent legitimist, then a liberal royalist, then a constitutionalist of an indefinite type, then a republican; and it does not appear that any of these phases was the result of reasoned conviction, but rather of a vague kind of sentiment and of the contagion of popular and prevalent ideas. In regard to money he was entirely disinterested, never obtaining or seeking any lucrative office. That he was quite so disinterested in the matter of personal vanity and ambition cannot perhaps be safely affirmed. He did good by moderating the revolutionary and destructive ardour of the Parisian populace in 1848; but he had been perhaps more responsible than any other single person for bringing about the events of that year by the vague and frothy republican declamation of his Histoire des Girondins. Altogether little more can be said of his political career than that he was the most striking if not the most successful instance of the French system, which has prevailed since the downfall of the first empire, of making literary success a direct road to political eminence.
More must be said of his literary position. Lamartine had the advantage of coming at a time when the literary field, at least in the departments of belles lettres, was almost empty. The feeble school of descriptive writers, epic poets of the extreme decadence, fabulists, and miscellaneous verse-makers which the empire had nourished could satisfy no one, though its members still continued with unceasing fidelity to copy themselves and their models. Madame de Stael was dead; Chateaubriand, though alive, was something of a classic, and had not effected a full revolution. Lamartine did not himself go the complete length of the romantic revival, but he went far in that direction. He availed himself of the reviving interest in legitimism and Catholicism which was represented by Bonald and Joseph de Maistre, of the nature worship of Rousseau and Bernardin de St Pierre, of the sentimentalism of Madame de Stael, of the mediævalism and the romance of Chateaubriand and Scott, of the maladie du siècle of Chateaubriand and Byron. Perhaps if his
