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Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844
Even in the woods of America, the same ruling passion was evinced. In those pathless solitudes, where no human foot had ever trod but that of the wandering savage, and the majesty of nature appeared in undisturbed repose, his thoughts were still of the Old World. It was on the historic lands that his heart was set. A man himself, he dwelt on the scenes which had been signalized by the deeds, the sufferings, the glories of man.
Michaud's mind is akin to that of Chateaubriand, and yet different in many important particulars. The learned and indefatigable historian of the Crusades, he has traversed the shores of the Mediterranean – the scene, as Dr Johnson observed, of all that can ever interest man – his religion, his knowledge, his arts – with the ardent desire to imprint on his mind the scenes and images which met the eyes of the holy warriors. He seeks to transport us to the days of Godfrey of Bouillon and Raymond of Toulouse; he thirsts with the Christian host at Dorislaus, he shares in its anxieties at the siege of Antioch, he participates in its exultation at the storming of Jerusalem. The scenes visited by the vast multitude of warriors who, during two hundred years, were precipitated from Europe on Asia, have almost all been visited by him, and described with the accuracy of an antiquary and the enthusiasm of a poet. With the old chronicles in his hand, he treads with veneration the scenes of former generous sacrifice and heroic achievements, and the vast and massy structures erected on either side during those terrible wars – when, for centuries, Europe strove hand to hand with Asia – most of which have undergone very little alteration, enable him to describe them almost exactly as they appeared to the holy warriors. The interest of his pilgrimage in the East, accordingly, is peculiar, but very great; it is not so much a book of travels as a moving chronicle; but, like Sir W. Scott's Minstrelsy of the Borders, it is a chronicle clothed in a very different garb from the homely dress of the olden time. It transports us back, not only in time but in idea, six hundred years; but it does so with the grace of modern times – it clothes the profound feelings, the generous sacrifices, the forgetfulness of self of the twelfth century, with the poetic mind, the cultivated taste, the refined imagery of the nineteenth.
Lamartine has traversed the same scenes with Chateaubriand and Michaud, and yet he has done so in a different spirit; and the character of his work is essentially different from either. He has not the devout credulity of the first, nor the antiquarian zeal and knowledge of the last; but he is superior to either in the description of nature, and the painting vivid and interesting scenes on the mind of the reader. His work is a moving panorama, in which the historic scenes and azure skies, and placid seas and glowing sunsets, of the East, are portrayed in all their native brilliancy, and in richer even than their native colours. His mind is stored with the associations and the ideas of antiquity, and he has thrown over his descriptions of the scenes of Greece or Holy Writ, all the charms of such recollections; but he has done so in a more general and catholic spirit than either of his predecessors. He embarked for the Holy Land shortly before the Revolution of 1830; and his thoughts, amidst all the associations of antiquity, constantly reverted to the land of his fathers – its distractions, its woes, its ceaseless turmoil, its gloomy social prospects. Thus, with all his vivid imagination and unrivaled powers of description, the turn of his mind is essentially contemplative. He looks on the past as an emblem of the present; he sees, in the fall of Tyre and Athens and Jerusalem, the fate which one day awaits his own country; and mourns less the decay of human things, than the popular passions and national sins which have brought that instability in close proximity to his own times. This sensitive and foreboding disposition was much increased by the death of his daughter – a charming child of fourteen, the companion of his wanderings, the depositary of his thoughts, the darling of his affections – who was snatched away in the spring of life, when in health and joy, by one of the malignant fevers incident to the pestilential plains of the East.
Though Lamartine's travels are continuous, he does not, like most other wanderers, furnish us with a journal of every day's proceedings. He was too well aware that many, perhaps most, days on a journey are monotonous or uninteresting; and that many of the details of a traveller's progress are wholly unworthy of being recorded, because they are neither amusing, elevating, nor instructive. He paints, now and then, with all the force of his magical pencil, the more brilliant or characteristic scenes which he visited, and intersperses them with reflections, moral and social; such as would naturally be aroused in a sensitive mind by the sight of the rains of ancient, and the contemplation of the decay of modern times.
He embarked at Marseilles, with Madame Lamartine and his little daughter Julia, on the 10th July 1830. The following is the picture of the yearnings of his mind on leaving his native land; and they convey a faithful image of his intellectual temperament: —
"I feel it deeply: I am one only of those men, without a distinctive character, of a transitory and fading epoch, whose sighs have found an echo – only because the echo was more poetical than the poet. I belong to another age by my desires: I feel in myself another man: the immense and boundless horizon of philosophy, at once profound, religious, and poetical, has opened to my view, but the punishment of a wasted youth overtook me; it soon faded from my sight. Adieu, then, to the dreams of genius, to the aspirations of intellectual enjoyment! It is too late: I have not physical strength to accomplish any thing great. I will sketch some scenes – I will murmur some strains, and that is all. Yet if God would grant my prayers, here is the object for which I would petition – a poem, such as my heart desires, and his greatness deserves! – a faithful, breathing image of his creation: of the boundless world, visible and invisible! That would indeed be a worthy inheritance to leave to an era of darkness, of doubt, and of sadness! – an inheritance which would nourish the present age, and cause the next to spring with renovated youth." – (Voyages en Orient, I. 49-60.46)
One of his first nocturnal reveries at sea, portrays the tender and profoundly religious impressions of his mind: —
"I walked for an hour on the deck of the vessel alone, and immersed alternately in sad or consoling reflections. I repeated in my heart all the prayers which I learned in infancy from my mother: the verses, the fragments of the Psalms, which I had so often heard her repeat to herself, when walking in the evening in the garden of Melly. I experienced a melancholy pleasure in thus scattering them, in my turn, to the waves, to the winds, to that Ear which is ever open to every real movement of the heart, though not yet uttered by the lips. The prayer which we have heard repeated by one we have loved, and who is no more, is doubly sacred. Who among us would not prefer a few words of prayer taught us by our mother, to the most eloquent supplication composed by ourselves? Thence it is that whatever religious creed we may adopt at the age of reason, the Christian prayer will be ever the prayer of the human race. I prayed, in the prayer of the church for the evening at sea; also for that dear being, who never thought of danger to accompany her husband, and that lovely child, who played at the moment on the poop with the goat which was to give it milk on board, and with the little kids which licked her snow-white hands, and sported with her long and fair ringlets." – (I. 57.)
A night-scene on the coast of Provence gives a specimen of his descriptive powers.
"It was night – that is, what they call night in those climates; but how many days have I seen less brilliant on the banks of the Thames, the Seine, the Saone, or the Lake of Geneva! A full noon shone in the firmament, and cast into the shade our vessel, which lay motionless on the water at a little distance from the quay. The moon, in her progress through the heavens, had left a path marked as if with red sand, with which she had besprinkled the half of the sky: the remainder was clear deep blue, which melted into white as she advanced. On the horizon, at the distance of two miles, between two little isles, of which the one had headlands pointed and coloured like the Coliseum at Rome, while the other was violet like the flower of the lilac, the image of a vast city appeared on the sea. It was an illusion, doubtless; but it had all the appearance of reality. You saw clearly the domes glancing – dazzling lines of palaces – quays flooded by a soft and serene light; on the right and the left the waves were seen to sparkle and enclose it on either side: it was Venice or Malta reposing in the midst of the waters. The illusion was produced by the reflection of the moon, when her rays fell perpendicularly on the waters; nearer the eye, the radiance spread and expanded in a stream of gold and silver between two shores of azure. On the left, the gulf extended to the summit of a long and obscure range of serrated mountains; on the right opened a narrow and deep valley, where a fountain gushed forth beneath the shade of aged trees; behind, rose a hill, clothed to the top with olives, which in the night appeared dark, from its summit to its base – a line of Gothic towers and white houses broke the obscurity of the wood, and drew the thoughts to the abodes, the joys, and the sufferings of man. Further off, in the extremity of the gulf, three enormous rocks rose, like pillars without base, from the surface of the waters – their forms were fantastic, their surface polished like flints by the action of the waves; but those flints were mountains – the remains, doubtless, of that primeval ocean which once overspread the earth, and of which our seas are but a feeble image." – (II. 66.)
A rocky bay on the same romantic coast, now rendered accessible to travellers by the magnificent road of the Corniché, projected, and in part executed by Napoleon, furnishes another subject for this exquisite pencil: —
"A mile to the eastward on the coast, the mountains, which there dip into the sea, are broken as if by the strokes of enormous clubs – huge fragments have fallen, and are strewed in wild confusion at the foot of the cliffs, or amidst the blue and green waves of the sea, which incessantly laves them. The waves break on these huge masses without intermission, with a hollow and alternating roar, or rise up in sheets of foam, which besprinkle their hoary fronts. These masses of mountains – for they are too large to be called rocks – are piled and heaped together in such numbers, that they form an innumerable number of narrow havens, of profound caverns, of sounding grottoes, of gloomy fissures – of which the children of some of the neighbouring fishermen alone know the windings and the issues. One of these caverns, into which you enter by a natural arch, the summit of which is formed by an enormous block of granite, lets in the sea, through which it flows into a dark and narrow valley, which the waters fill entirely, with a surface as limpid and smooth as the firmament which they reflect. The sea preserves in this sequestered nook that beautiful tint of bright green, of which marine painters so strongly feel the value, but which they can never transfer exactly to their canvass; for the eye sees much which the hand strives in vain to imitate.
"On the two sides of that marine valley rise two prodigious walls of perpendicular rock, of an uniform and sombre hue, similar to that of iron ore, after it has issued and cooled from the furnace. Not a plant, not a moss can find a slope or a crevice wherein to insert its roots, or cover the rocks with those waving garlands which so often in Savoy clothe the cliffs, where they flower to God alone. Black, naked, perpendicular, repelling the eye by their awful aspect – they seem to have been placed there for no other purpose but to protect from the sea-breezes the hills of olives and vines, which bloom under their shelter; an image of those ruling men in a stormy epoch, who seem placed by Providence to bear the fury of all the tempests of passion and of time, to screen the weaker but happier race of mortals. At the bottom of the bay the sea expands a little, assumes a bluer tint as it comes to reflect more of the cloudless heavens, and at length its tiny waves die away on a bed of violets, as closely netted together as the sand upon the shore. If you disembark from the boat, you find in the cleft of a neighbouring ravine a fountain of living water, which gushes beneath a narrow path formed by the goats, which leads up from this sequestered solitude, amidst overshadowing fig-trees and oleanders, to the cultivated abodes of man. Few scenes struck me so much in my long wanderings. Its charm consists in that exquisite union of force and grace, which forms the perfection of natural beauty as of the highest class of intellectual beings; it is that mysterious hymen of the land and the sea, surprised, as it were, in their most secret and hidden union. It is the image of perfect calm and inaccessible solitude, close to the theatre of tumultuous tempests, where their near roar is heard with such terror, where their foaming but lessened waves yet break upon the shore. It is one of those numerous chefs-d'œuvre of creation which God has scattered over the earth, as if to sport with contrasts, but which he conceals so frequently on the summit of naked rocks, in the depth of inaccessible ravines, on the unapproachable shores of the ocean, like jewels which he unveils rarely, and that only to simple beings, to children, to shepherds or fishermen, or the devout worshippers of nature." – (I. 73 – 74.)
This style of description of scenery is peculiar to this age, and in it Lamartine may safely be pronounced without a rival in the whole range of literature. It was with Scott and Chateaubriand that the graphic style of description arose in England and France; but he has pushed the art further than either of his great predecessors. Milton and Thompson had long ago indeed, in poetry, painted nature in the most enchanting, as well as the truest colours; but in prose little was to be found except a general and vague description of a class of objects, as lakes, mountains, and rivers, without any specification of features and details, so as to convey a definite and distinct impression to the mind of the reader. Even the classical mind and refined taste of Addison could not attain this graphic style; his descriptions of scenery, like that of all prose writers down to the close of the eighteenth century, are lost in vague generalities. Like almost all descriptions of battles in modern times, they are so like each other that you cannot distinguish one from the other. Scott and Chateaubriand, when they did apply their great powers to the delineation of nature, were incomparably faithful, as well as powerfully imaginative; but such descriptions were, for the most part, but a secondary object with them. The human heart was their great study; the vicissitudes of life the inexhaustible theme of their genius. With Lamartine, again, the description of nature is the primary object. It is to convey a vivid impression of the scenes he has visited that he has written; to kindle in his reader's mind the train of emotion and association which their contemplation awakened in his own, that he has exerted all his powers. He is much more laboured and minute, in consequence, than either of his predecessors; he records the tints, the forms, the lights, the transient effects, with all a painter's enthusiasm and all a poet's power; and succeeds, in any mind at all familiar with the objects of nature, in conjuring up images as vivid, sometimes perhaps more beautiful, than the originals which he portrayed.
From the greatness of his powers, however, in this respect, and the facility with which he commits to paper the whole features of the splendid phantasmagoria with which his memory is stored, arises the principal defect of his work; and the circumstance which has hitherto prevented it, in this country at least, from acquiring general popularity commensurate to its transcendent merits. He is too rich in glowing images; his descriptions are redundant in number and beauty. The mind even of the most imaginative reader is fatigued by the constant drain upon its admiration – the fancy is exhausted in the perpetual effort to conceive the scenes which he portrays to the eye. Images of beauty enough are to be found in his four volumes of Travels in the East, to emblazon, with the brightest colours of the rainbow, forty volumes of ordinary adventure. We long for some repose amidst the constant repetition of dazzling objects; monotony, insipidity, ordinary life, even dulness itself, would often be a relief amidst the ceaseless flow of rousing images. Sir Walter Scott says, in one of his novels – "Be assured that whenever I am particularly dull, it is not without an object;" and Lamartine would sometimes be the better of following the advice. We generally close one of his volumes with the feeling so well known to travellers in the Italian cities, "I hope to God there is nothing more to be seen here." And having given the necessary respite of unexciting disquisition to rest our readers' minds, we shall again bring forward one of his glowing pictures: —
"Between the sea and the last heights of Lebanon, which sink rapidly almost to the water's edge, extends a plain eight leagues in length by one or two broad; sandy, bare, covered only with thorny arbutus, browsed by the camels of caravans. From it darts out into the sea an advanced peninsula, linked to the continent only by a narrow chaussée of shining sand, borne hither by the winds of Egypt. Tyre, now called Sour by the Arabs, is situated at the extremity of this peninsula, and seems, at a distance, to rise out of the waves. The modern town, at first sight, has a gay and smiling appearance; but a nearer approach dispels the illusion, and exhibits only a few hundred crumbling and half-deserted houses, where the Arabs, in the evening, assemble to shelter their flocks which have browsed in the narrow plain. Such is all that now remains of the mighty Tyre. It has neither a harbour to the sea, nor a road to the land; the prophecies have long been accomplished in regard to it.
"We moved on in silence, buried in the contemplation of the dust of an empire which we trod. We followed a path in the middle of the plain of Tyre, between the town and the hills of grey and naked rock which Lebanon has thrown down towards the sea. We arrived abreast of the city, and touched a mound of sand which appears the sole remaining rampart to prevent it from being overwhelmed by the waves of the ocean or the desert. I thought of the prophecies, and called to mind some of the eloquent denunciations of Ezekiel. As I was making these reflections, some objects, black, gigantic, and motionless, appeared upon the summit of one of the overhanging cliffs of Lebanon, which there advanced far into the plain. They resembled five black statues, placed on a rock as their huge pedestal. At first we thought it was five Bedouins, who were there stationed to fire upon us from their inaccessible heights; but when we were at the distance of fifty yards, we beheld one of them open its enormous wings, and flap them against its sides with a sound like the unfurling of a sail. We then perceived that they were five eagles of the largest species I have ever seen, either in the Alps or our museums. They made no attempt to move when we approached; they seemed to regard themselves as kings of the desert, looked on Tyre as an appanage which belonged to them, and whither they were about to return. Nothing more supernatural ever met my eyes; I could almost suppose that behind them I saw the terrible figure of Ezekiel, the poet of vengeance, pointing to the devoted city which the divine wrath had overwhelmed with destruction. The discharge of a few muskets made them rise from their rock: but they showed no disposition to move from their ominous perch, and, soon returning, floated over our heads, regardless of the shots fired at them, as if the eagles of God were beyond the reach of human injury." – (II. 8-9.)
Jerusalem was a subject to awaken all our author's enthusiasm, and call forth all his descriptive powers. The first approach to it has exercised the talents of many writers in prose and verse; but none has drawn it in such graphic and brilliant colours as our author: —
"We ascended a mountain ridge, strewed over with enormous grey rocks, piled one on another as if by human hands. Here and there a few stunted vines, yellow with the colour of autumn, crept along the soil in a few places cleared out in the wilderness. Fig-trees, with their tops withered or shivered by the blasts, often edged the vines, and cast their black fruit on the grey rock. On our right, the desert of St John, where formerly 'the voice was heard crying in the wilderness,' sank like an abyss in the midst of five or six black mountains, through the openings of which, the sea of Egypt, overspread with a dark cloud, could still be discerned. On the left, and near the eye, was an old tower, placed on the top of a projecting eminence; other ruins, apparently of an ancient aqueduct, descended from that tower, overgrown with verdure, now in the sear leaf; that tower is Modin, the stronghold and tomb of the last heroes of sacred story, the Maccabees. We left behind us the ruins, resplendent with the first rays of the morning – rays, not blended as in Europe in a confused and vague illumination, but darting like arrows of fire tinted with various colours, issuing from a dazzling centre, and diverging over the whole heavens as they expand. Some were of blue, slightly silvered, others of pure white, some of tender rose-hue, melting into grey; many of burning fire, like the coruscations of a flaming conflagration. All were distinct, yet all united in one harmonious whole, forming a resplendent arch in the heavens, encircling, and issuing from a centre of fire. In proportion as the day advanced, the brilliant light of these separate rays was gradually dimmed – or rather, they were blended together, and composed the colourless light of day. Then the moon, which still shone overhead, 'paled her ineffectual fire,' and melted away in the general illumination of the heavens.
"After having ascended a second ridge, more lofty and naked than the former, the horizon suddenly opens to the right, and presents a view of all the country which extends between the last summits of Judea and the mountains of Arabia. It was already flooded with the increasing light of the morning; but beyond the piles of grey rock which lay in the foreground, nothing was distinctly visible but a dazzling space, like a vast sea, interspersed with a few islands of shade, which stood forth in the brilliant surface. On the shores of that imaginary ocean, a little to the left, and about a league distant, the sun shone with uncommon brilliancy on a massy tower, a lofty minaret, and some edifices, which crowned the summit of a low hill of which you could not see the bottom. Soon the points of other minarets, a few loopholed walls, and the dark summits of several domes, which successively came into view, and fringed the descending slope of the hill, announced a city. It was Jerusalem, and every one of the party, without addressing a word to the guides or to each other, enjoyed in silence the entrancing spectacle. We rested our horses to contemplate that mysterious and dazzling apparition; but when we moved on, it was soon snatched from our view; for as we descended the hill, and plunged into the deep and profound valley which lay at its feet, we lost sight of the holy city, and were surrounded only by the solitude and desolation of the desert." – (II. 163-165.)
The environs of Jerusalem are described with equal force by the same master-hand: —
"The general aspect of the environs of Jerusalem may be described in a few words. Mountains without shade, and valleys without water – the earth without verdure, rocks without grandeur. Here and there a few blocks of grey stone start up out of the dry and fissured earth, between which, beneath the shade of an old fig-tree, a gazelle or a hyæna are occasionally seen to emerge from the fissures of the rock. A few plants or vines creep over the surface of that grey and parched soil; in the distance, is occasionally seen a grove of olive-trees, casting a shade over the arid side of the mountain – the mouldering walls and towers of the city appearing from afar on the summit of Mount Sion. Such is the general character of the country. The sky is ever pure, bright, and cloudless; never does even the slightest film of mist obscure the purple tint of evening and morning. On the side of Arabia, a wide gulf opens amidst the black ridges, and presents a vista of the shining surface of the Dead Sea, and the violet summits of the mountains of Moab. Rarely is a breath of air heard to murmur, in the fissures of the rocks, or among the branches of the aged olives; not a bird sings, nor an insect chirps in the waterless furrows. Silence reigns universally, in the city, in the roads, in the fields. Such was Jerusalem during all the time that we spent within its walls. Not a sound ever met our ears, but the neighing of the horses, who grew impatient under the burning rays of the sun, or who furrowed the earth with their feet, as they stood picketed round our camp, mingled occasionally with the crying of the hour from the minarets, or the mournful cadences of the Turks as they accompanied the dead to their cemeteries. Jerusalem, to which the world hastens to visit a sepulchre, is itself a vast tomb of a people; but it is a tomb without cypresses, without inscriptions, without monuments, of which they have broken the gravestones, and the ashes of which appear to cover the earth which surrounds it with mourning, silence, and sterility. We cast our eyes back frequently from the top of every hill which we passed on this mournful and desolate region, and at length we saw for the last time, the crown of olives which surmounts the Mount of the same name, and which long rises above the horizon after you have lost sight of the town itself. At length it also sank beneath the rocky screen, and disappeared like the chaplets of flowers which we throw on a sepulchre." – (II. 275-276.)
